


Blood and Red Lyrium

by Luaithe



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Red Lyrium, Blood Mages, Blood Magic, Gen, Kirkwall (Dragon Age), Lyrium Addiction, Post-Dragon Age II, Red Lyrium, Red Templar Cullen, Red Templars, Templars (Dragon Age), no happy endings here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-07-03 08:40:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 65,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15815385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luaithe/pseuds/Luaithe
Summary: The Champion of Kirkwall is dead. The Chantry is gone. Knight-Commander Meredith is Viscountess of Kirkwall. But in the wake of the Circle’s annulment, the blood mages that once hid in the shadows have chosen to face the Order head on. Kirkwall is at war with itself.A Red Lyrium AU set after DAII and before Inquisition.





	1. Entering Kirkwall

**Author's Note:**

> Advance warning: There is no happy ending to this story as planned. This is an AU where things go completely wrong, inspired by a passing comment left on my DAII fic about what might have happened if Meredith had been able to gain control of Kirkwall (thanks proseisarose). The idea was playing around in my head for a while, so I ended up going overboard imagining what might have happened in Kirkwall in that scenario.
> 
> Takes place after the events of DAII, but before Inquisition would have happened.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassandra Pentaghast, Right Hand of the Divine and Seeker of Truth, arrives in a city under martial law

>   _A single piece of red lyrium surfaced in the eastern city of Kirkwall, and its influence alone was nearly enough to cause the city's destruction._
> 
> _—From a partially burned letter by an unknown writer, affixed with the Grey Warden seal._

Cassandra tugged the hood of her coat a little closer over her head and hunched her shoulders. The approach into Kirkwall was dark, lanterns left unlit for Maker knew how long, but it paid to be cautious when entering enemy territory. As much as she didn’t want to think of the city that way, it was hard to call it anything else.

Kirkwall was a place that people tried to escape, not one they tried to enter. Only fools wanted to sneak _into_ the city. Cassandra prayed she didn’t count among them for attempting to infiltrate a city crawling with maleficarum and corrupt templars. A Seeker of Truth and Right Hand of the Divine handled plenty of difficult assignments. Walking into a city with minimal information where every person could be an enemy would likely to rank amongst the most challenging. Or suicidal. She regretted that discretion meant leaving the rest of the Seeker forces with whom she had travelled outside the city. Hopefully they wouldn’t be needed.

Cassandra approached the city gates cautiously. The twinned bronze statues of weeping slaves seemed a fitting representation of Kirkwall’s past and current state. In an ideal situation, there ought to have been members of the City Guard manning the guard posts at either side, but they were as dark as the road leading into the city. Clearly no one expected visitors.

Kirkwall offered suicidal visitors like her two points of entry. Most entered via the sea route, landing at the expansive docks that handled most trade between the Free Marches, Orlais, and Ferelden. Or they would have, once. It ought to have been easy to slip into the city unannounced through such a busy approach. But Knight-Commander Meredith controlled anything and everything that came into Kirkwall via the Waking Sea. Ever since she had named herself Viscountess of Kirkwall, nothing entered by sea that hadn’t passed under the eyes of her templars. The Gallows watched over it all, and with their Circle annulled, the army of templars that Meredith commanded could exert as much control as she needed.

Little information had been allowed out of Kirkwall in the two years since Meredith’s ascension to the position of Viscount. Traders — the main source of information ever since the stream of refugees after the chantry explosion had dried up — were restricted to the docks. But what little information had been provided was enough to paint a grim picture. Meredith led a splinter faction of templars. Renegades that were entirely cut off from the outside world and had taken an entire city-state with them. With their own source of lyrium and the Kirkwall chantry two years gone, they were immune to whatever source of control the Chantry might have been able to exert over them. And with communications suppressed, it was impossible to say how or why they had managed that feat. There were whisperings that the templars were corrupted in more than just spirit. That the Gallows was slowly being transformed into a glowing crystal spire was easily verified by every trade ship that passed through the city. What that meant for the templars within was unknown. It was more than enough to tell Cassandra that they would not welcome the presence of a Seeker, let alone a Hand of the Divine. Far better for her and the small force outside the city to avoid putting themselves in Templars’ hands unless absolutely necessary.

That meant that the only anonymous way in or out of the city was to take a land route, and pray you didn’t bump into any of the blood mages stalking the back alleys for victims. What little information did escape from beyond the docks was enough to say that the blood mage problem that had cursed Kirkwall for years was still barely contained by Meredith’s splinter faction. It was hard to say what was worse. Rampant blood magic, or the renegade templars who had been fighting it to a standstill for nigh on eight years.

She walked through the open gates and began the cautious route towards the designated location for her contact. Almost immediately, the oppressive tightness of the city had her hunching her shoulders a little further. Buildings two or three storeys high loomed overhead, cutting down her view of the sky to a narrow slice, half filled with the cliffs of Hightown. What little illumination was provided by the moons and scattering of stars was enough to light up the street ahead, but any detail was lost in the gloom. Occasionally, warm light light might spill out from the narrow window of a home or a hurried figure might be seen scurrying from one place to another, but the streets were eerily quiet for a busy city-state like Kirkwall.

Cassandra cut down a side alley, praying she had recalled the directions correctly. She curled her fingers about the hilt of her sword. The main thoroughfares didn’t seem especially safe, but back alleys had to be even worse.

A stocky figure detached itself from the shadows of the alley, unshouldering a crossbow as it approached. There was the distinct ratcheting sound of a bolt being loaded. The figure stepped into a pool of moonlight, revealing a clean-shaven dwarf. He looked Cassandra up and down.

“You’re Seeker Pentaghast, I assume. You’re crazy, you know that?” the dwarf said dryly. “No one wants to get into Kirkwall these days.”

Cassandra grunted. That answered her question on her sanity. “You are Master Tethras?”

“Varric Tethras, at your service.” He grinned toothily. “You may have read some of my books?”

“Now is not the time for games, dwarf,” Cassandra replied with exasperation.

The dwarf’s grin grew a little wider before fading away entirely. He shifted his crossbow to settle a little more comfortably in his arms. “I’ve got to admit, Seeker, when your Sister Nightingale got in touch to say you were coming, I was hoping for an army.”

“Unfortunately, Kirkwall has fallen low on the Chantry's list of priorities,” Cassandra replied apologetically. “There are others outside Kirkwall if reinforcements are required. I am here to determine how severe the problem is.”

“How seve-” The dwarf stopped and shook his head in disbelief. “Maferath’s balls, Seeker! You have a fortress full of mad templars that are barely even human any more and a city full of blood mages. I’d call that pretty severe. Exactly the kind of problem Seekers are supposed to handle”

Cassandra sighed in frustration. “I do not disagree, but we have been focused on rebellion in the Circles. The Divine cannot afford to divert significant forces here unless absolutely necessary.”

The dwarf waved a dismissive hand. “I guess I can’t argue with the Chantry.” He began to sidle off into the shadows of the alleyway. “Follow me, Seeker. It’s not safe to stay out on the streets too long. This is blood mage territory.”

“Start talking, dwarf,” Cassandra ordered as she followed him. “Is it truly as bad as your information claimed?”

“You want the short answer? Yeah, it’s bad. Knight-Commander Meredith has gone completely mad trying to get a handle on the blood mage problem here. Nothing she's done has stopped them from pouring into the city. It just got worse after the chantry explosion. These days, you’ve got crystal templar monstrosities fighting blood mages in the streets.”

Cassandra’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. Your letters did mention some strange corrupt form of lyrium. I find it hard to believe. I’ve never heard of such a thing before.”

“You should see the Gallows. I’m pretty sure it’s more red lyrium than stone by this point.” Varric let out a humourless chuckle that echoed harshly off the narrows sides of the alley. His voice dropped to a low mutter. “If I never see the Deep Roads again, it’ll be too soon.”

He walked a while longer in brooding silence. Cassandra tossed him a measuring look. His letters had suggested he held himself partially to blame for events in Kirkwall, as if he could have stopped a small army of templars. She turned away from the hunched figure and took in what little could be seen of their surroundings. A crude symbol daubed in what she hoped was dark paint caught her eye. An open hand with a slash across the palm.

“Let me guess. Blood mages?”

Varric shook off his introspection and nodded. “The templars don’t tend to get this far from the Gallows unless they need to. Blood mages usually stick to Hightown, but they come down here every now and then.”

He led her out of the alley onto a main thoroughfare. Gradually, more people began to appear, although they still had the wary movements of people who weren’t sure what to expect from the conspicuously armed woman and dwarf who passed them by. He stopped at a crossroads and pointed discreetly down one path.

“We’re heading that way into Templar territory, but there’s a checkpoint.” He looked up at Cassandra. “I’m assuming you avoided the sea route because you don’t want to cross paths with templars? Better to avoid an argument about curfew. We can take the back roads.”

Cassandra nodded, but hesitated before following Varric. “I want to see these supposed corrupt templars of yours.”

Varric gave her a sidelong glance. “You don’t believe me?”

“I am not interested in your stories,” she replied, barely able to stop herself from rolling her eyes. “I came to see the truth.”

“I’ve told a lot of stories, Seeker, but this one is all true,” Varric retorted. “This is my city. I’m not going to mess up a chance to get things fixed by lying to you.” He tugged her down a side route. “You’ll see plenty of patrols once we get into Templar territory. But you don’t want to draw attention to yourself by staring at the checkpoints.”

“Do not lie to me, Varric. _Are_ they somehow corrupted by this fabled red lyrium of yours?” she asked insistently as she allowed herself to be led away. “Lyrium is found in the Deep Roads, it does not …" she gestured helplessly in the air, looking for a word that didn't rely on the flowery descriptions provided by Varric, "grow …. on people.”

“That’s what I used to think too. No one I managed to contact in Orzammar knew what to make of it,” Varric replied darkly. “Most of the templars you see on the streets look pretty normal. Like shit, but normal. I’ve only seen the really messed up ones from a distance. Believe me, they’re not the kind of people you want to bump into late at night. Or any time, really.” He eyed her sword. “I hope you know how to use that if we do.”

"I pray it won't come to that," she replied. But she settled a hand about the hilt of her sword regardless.

They cut through a complex system of back alleys and side roads until they found themselves back on a main thoroughfare. Here, the streets were lit by the occasional torch or lantern, rather than faint moonlight. Varric settled his crossbow on his back and seemed slightly more comfortable. But there wasn’t a single person in sight. City-wide curfew kept most people inside, especially where they were likely to encounter templars enforcing martial law.

“Dwarves are pretty safe in Templar territory,” he commented idly. “They know we can’t be apostates or blood mages, so they leave us alone. Humans and elves? Not so lucky. You’d better not even think of carrying anything vaguely staff-like, Seeker, or we’ll never see you again.”

Cassandra’s eyes narrowed. Caution was to be expected in a city like Kirkwall. Paranoia was more worrying. It was a common indicator of a templar in the late stages of lyrium withdrawal. But it seemed unlikely that every single templar in Kirkwall would be suffering from the long-term effects of lyrium use at the same time, unless Varric’s red lyrium had different properties to normal lyrium. She set the information to one side. There would be time to gather more. Hopefully, there would be a safe way to speak to Knight-Commander Meredith directly, without any need for deception.

“Where is this safehouse of yours?” she asked.

“The alienage. Friend of mine has a house there,” Varric replied. “The templars sweep through the area regularly, but she’s discreet.”

“Discreet?” Cassandra asked with a touch of suspicion.

“Ah, yeah.” Varric laughed awkwardly and avoided meeting her eyes. “You’ll find out why that’s necessary.”

He was saved from any further explanation by the distant sound of armoured boots marching in unison. Cassandra peered down towards the crossroads at the end of the thoroughfare, catching sight of the dull gleam of torchlight on armour and the bright red and blue of templar robes.

“Perhaps now I can see these corrupt templars of yours,” Cassandra said dryly.

“Unlikely. It’s a standard patrol. We’ve had them ever since Meredith disbanded the Guard.” Varric indicated an alleyway further up the street. “We can keep out of their way down there.”

They slipped into the alleyway and retreated far enough that they would be out of sight of the pool of light cast by the templars’ torches. As they drew closer, the crisp sound of their marching feet was joined by an odd echo. Cassandra shook her head slightly. Varric’s stories had made her paranoid. Most likely a product of Kirkwall’s tall and narrow streets.

The first pair marched in lockstep past the alley’s mouth. Perfectly maintained armour and weapons, neat robes swirling about their feet as they marched. Their movements were fluid and controlled, but no more so than any other of the Chantry’s elite soldiers. There seemed to be nothing odd about them at all. A perfectly normal squad of templars following an abnormal set of orders from a rogue commanding officer. This would be far simpler if only the command structure had to be dismantled. She turned a frown on the dwarf at the opposite side of the alley.

“I hope you were not exaggerating, Varric,” she said quietly.

She caught the vague movement of his shrugging shoulders in the darkness. “Like I said,” he whispered across to her. “Most of them look pretty normal, especially from a distance.”

Cassandra started back slightly as one templar turned his head briefly to look in her direction. She could have sworn that she had seen a faint red glow in the darkness behind the eye slits of his full helm. She found herself grateful that they were concealed in the shadows.

“A trick of the light, surely,” she muttered to herself. “Stray embers from the torches.”

Varric tossed her a knowing look and waited for the last of the squad to pass by the mouth of the alley.

“Your first sight of Kirkwall’s templar protectors,” he said once the sound of marching feet had faded. “As far as I’ve seen, the weirder ones don’t get assigned to patrols. They’re less …. approachable.”

She glared at him. He held up his hands. “Fine, fine. We’ll try and find some weird ones for you later. There are usually some manning the cordons around the docks. For now, let’s just get off the streets before we get caught.”

He led her back out into the maze of streets and back alleys. This close to the docks, and hence the Gallows, the area was firmly under Meredith’s steel fist. The complex knotwork symbol of the Gallows was stencilled in bright red paint on every major crossroads and square. Every inhabitant knew precisely where the power in this city lay. Yet despite the oppressive reminders of Meredith’s authoritarian rule, the area seemed to be more inhabited than the outskirts. More often than not, warm light and sounds of life spilled out of the windows of the buildings they passed.

She and Varric didn’t seem to be the only people willing to break the curfew. Varric exchanged nods with the handful of other people they passed in the back alleys. They were warned of another outwardly normal patrol of templars, and again dodged them in the shadows.

Finally, they entered the alienage. Varric led her to a small home nestled right in the heart of the district, beneath the grand spreading canopy of the Vhenadahl.

He hesitated before pushing open the door. “Look, Seeker,  just … keep that sword sheathed, please.”

“I worry about the kind of allies you have, Varric.” She said warily, before raising her hands. “No sword.”

Varric pushed open the door and led the way into a sparsely furnished home. “Hey, Daisy!” he called out. “I’ve found our visitor from the Chantry. Seeker Pentaghast, meet Merrill.”

An elf emerged from deeper inside the house, stepping lightly around a pile of books on the floor. “It’s nice to meet you,” she said cheerfully.

“So, Varric,” Cassandra began cautiously.

Varric exhaled. “Merrill is an apostate outside a Circle.”

“There has been no Circle in Kirkwall for two years, so the point is moot,” Cassandra said flatly. “I sense something further.”

“What Varric wants to tell you is that I’m a blood mage,” Merrill filled in when Varric appeared reluctant to go further.

Cassandra growled and went for her sword. “A blood mage!?” she hissed. “ _This_ is your trustworthy ally, Varric? I was a fool to trust you!”

Varric grabbed her arm. “Merrill’s harmless. Hawke trusted her. Kind of. Maybe.”

“Hawke didn’t trust me, Varric,” Merrill scolded him. “But she knew I wasn’t going to hurt anyone but myself.”

“Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you now,” Cassandra ordered.

“We’re all that’s left of Hawke’s friends,” Varric rushed out, hand still on Cassandra’s sword arm. “You want information about what’s happening in Kirkwall. She has it.” When Cassandra still seemed reluctant, he continued. “Look, she’s lived under the Templars’ noses since not long after Hawke arrived. If she was a vicious blood mage, she’d be out there with the rest of them.”

Cassandra grunted in disgust and forced her sword back into its sheath. “I hope I do not regret this,” she growled. “If you cast anything near me, I will kill you, maleficar.”

“Let’s just sit down, shall we?” Varric said with false cheer. “We can all enjoy killing each other after we fix an entire city.”

Cassandra reluctantly settled herself in a chair, hand still resting on the pommel of her sword. Varric took another, leaving Merrill to perch lightly on a table a sensible distance away with the dwarf as a rudimentary barrier between the two.

Cassandra turned a glare on Varric. “I thought you said that Champion Hawke had many allies.”

“’Had’ being the important word there, Seeker. Me and Daisy here are the only ones left. Fenris, Carver, and Sebastian all got themselves killed along with Hawke. Isabela left years before any of this happened. Aveline was executed for sedition.” He listed each fate neutrally, but he shoulders slumped a little further each time.

Cassandra frowned. “What about the apostate?”

“Anders? Dead too,” Varric replied, voice oddly flat and hard. “He’s a martyr as far as the blood mages are concerned. Better than Andraste herself.” He folded his arms and scowled. “A _lot_ of people died in the explosion, Seeker. That’s a lot of blood soaking into the streets. The templars holed up in the Gallows after the chantry explosion, and there weren’t enough of the Guard left to help out.”

“So reports have suggested. I must find a way to speak to Knight-Commander Meredith and find out why she made the decisions she has after the chantry was destroyed.”

Varric laughed. “Good luck with that. She doesn’t come into the city any more. Too dangerous for her. Pretty much everyone wants her head on a pike. You’d need to get into the Gallows to speak to her.”

Cassandra leaned back in her chair and studied the dwarf with a scowl. “Nevertheless, the Divine needs to know what Meredith has been doing. Can she not be encouraged to leave?

“Not a chance, Seeker,” Varric chuckled. “You’d need an army to pry her out. She sends her subordinates to do her dirty work in the city.”

Cassandra sighed. “Then I would need to convince the Divine that the situation is severe enough for an Exalted March to address the problem.”

“How is it not already severe?” Merrill asked.

Cassandra cast a baleful look over to her before answering reluctantly. “She leads a renegade chapter of the Order, but strictly, they are still doing what is required of them by fighting these blood mages.”

“Come on, Seeker,” Varric growled. “They’re pulling people off the streets, accusing them of being apostates. You can’t tell me that’s right.”

“Seekers have been called to Kirkwall too many times for the Lord Seeker to take reports seriously any more. I need convincing proof.” She stood and paced restlessly about the cramped room, hand stroking the hilt of her sword. The only way to convince the Chantry to release forces from securing the Circles of Magi was if there was a mage threat more serious than that. They didn’t have time for a splinter faction of Templars, but maleficarum? “An Exalted March can be called if I can prove that the blood mage threat is organised or severe, beyond the capability of a single chapter of the Order to handle, however large that chapter might be.”

“Well that’s easy,” Merrill said brightly. “They’re leaving their runes all over the place. We’ll go look at one.”

Cassandra stopped dead. “They are leaving runes around the city?”

“Oh yes.” Merrill shivered. “Nasty things. A mixture of blood magic and something I’ve never seen before. Something old.”

Varric nodded slowly. “Yeah, maybe a Seeker like you knows more about that than we do.”

“That may be true,” Cassandra replied cautiously. “You would be able to find one for me?”

“Easily,” Merrill replied. “Any mage can feel them. They’re leaving weak spots in the Veil all over Kirkwall.”

Cassandra’s blood ran cold. None of their informants had been mages until now. Much as she hated to trust a blood mage, she had been provided more details now than from a month of gathering information from traders in and out of Kirkwall. She wasn’t sure she wanted the information now that she had it. The Veil had to have already been damaged by so many deaths. Weakening it further, accidentally or otherwise, was a recipe for disaster.

“Are they purposefully weakening the Veil?” she asked urgently. “Knight-Commander Meredith can wait. I must see one of these runes immediately.”

Varric held up a hand to stop cut off any further response. “What Daisy is forgetting is that the Templars are investigating these things too, Seeker. They may have gone mad, but that’s just made them even crazier about crushing blood magic.”

Cassandra scowled. “Surely we should have time to conduct our own investigation before templars arrive from the Gallows.”

“Hopefully.” Varric shrugged helplessly. “As long as they weren’t in the area already.”

“It’s a risk we must take,” Cassandra said flatly. “Lead the way, maleficar.”

Merrill jumped down from her seat on the table and began to move off for the door.

“Hey, Seeker, maybe we should wait for daytime,” Varric protested. “Much easier to avoid trouble if we’re not dodging patrols all night.”

Cassandra glared at him. “I will not stay here all night with a blood mage, dwarf.”

“I was worried you were going to say that.” He scratched the back of his neck and sighed reluctantly. “The Hanged Man is nearby. It’s a proper Kirkwall tavern. I’m sure you’ll love it.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” she replied irritably, before nodding a reluctant agreement. She had told her reinforcements to wait for a week before moving into Kirkwall. Waiting one night wouldn't bring the city down around their ears. Hopefully.

Varric breathed sigh of relief. "Tomorrow, then.”


	2. Kirkwall's Problems

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassandra discovers that things are far worse in Kirkwall than she expected.

 

> _We do not know, however, what might stem from extended contact with red lyrium. Madness, surely, but would there be a physical corruption as well?_
> 
> _—From a partially burned letter by an unknown writer, affixed with the Grey Warden seal._

 

 

> _The mason showed me a plan of the city, and my heart skipped a beat. There were patterns in the intersections, back alleys, and boulevards. Some magisters believed in the power of symbols or shapes. In the oldest parts of the city, one can make out the outlines of glyphs in the very streets! What manner of magic is this?_
> 
> _—Underneath a cobblestone with curious markings and signed, "The Band of Three"_

 

At first, people had welcomed Meredith’s martial law. Kirkwall’s overgenerous population of blood mages had taken the chantry explosion as a call to arms. After more than a week of silence from the Gallows without the sight of a single Sword of Mercy, massed ranks of Templars marching into the city were greeted with bottomless relief. Templars had fought their way through the streets, clearing demons, abominations, and possessed corpses. Those blood mages they couldn’t kill were forced back into the impenetrable maze of collapsed tunnels that Darktown had become.

As Kirkwall’s steward, Meredith had been close enough to being the Viscount that no one even noticed when she claimed the title officially. For a while, there had been something approaching peace as people focused more on rebuilding than on worrying what martial law meant for their future. The heavy templar presence in Kirkwall seemed to be a fair price for keeping the blood mages confined to Darktown.

It couldn’t last. The Order in Kirkwall might have been allowed to become a small army with no protest from the Chantry, but less than one thousand templars couldn’t cover a city with tens of thousands of inhabitants, even now that they had no Circle to guard. The Order were more than a match for rogue mages, but it took years to train a templar and only a matter of weeks for a blood mage to become accustomed to controlling their new powers. And an abomination created by those who couldn’t maintain control could emerge in a matter of seconds. Even taking every apostate off the streets wouldn’t have been enough with maleficarum streaming into the city.

Gradually, the templars had been forced to retreat. First, they had ceded Hightown. The mansions and estates perched on the cliffs had covered the vast network of passages that made up Darktown. With collapses triggered by aftershocks all across the city, there were far too many entrances to be properly secured. Resources were stretched to breaking point by stationing templars so far from their fortress in the bay. They had pulled back, and the Gallows fortress had replaced the Viscount's Keep as the home of the city’s leader. A Templar Knight-Commander ruled from the heart of Templar power in the Free Marches, a far more fitting and secure location than the damaged Viscount’s Keep.

Gradually, those who had not fled the city entirely gravitated towards the districts closest to the docks, where they could be reasonably certain that the proximity to the Gallows would be enough to avoid encountering blood mages. The districts had the added benefit of being furthest from the chantry and hence the least damaged by the explosion. Those districts that climbed up to the cliffs and merged with Hightown had been devastated, but the lower districts were almost intact. With the population in the city’s outskirts plummeting, Meredith saw no reason to continue providing protection to the area. Templar forces were pulled back further, leaving a third of Lowtown as a no man’s land that blood mages were happy to venture into as their numbers grew.

Again, the situation in Kirkwall appeared to have reached a new equilibrium. It had become a city of two halves. The blood mages claimed Hightown. The Templars secured the docks and Lowtown and hence controlled all trade and traffic into and out of the city. Hightown’s residents still managed to live up on the cliffs, but they spent their days looking over their shoulders. In Lowtown, you only needed to spend your days that way if you were suspected of apostasy or collaboration with maleficarum. There was no Circle. No one could say what happened to those who were proven to be apostates.

Kirkwallers agreed that Meredith must have gone power mad, but she was tolerated for being better than the indiscriminate danger associated with living near blood mages. There was hardly anything that untrained citizens still scarred by the tragedy of the chantry explosion could do to resist the Chantry’s elite warriors even if they had wanted.

But whilst the blood mages grew more and more daring, people gradually began to notice that something was … wrong with their templar protectors. People didn’t pay much attention to the occasionally aggressive mood swings. Templars had always been a distant and forbidding presence in their fortress. They were facing blood mage incursions nearly every day, a little emotional instability was hardly surprising. But people with friends or relatives in the Order began to pass rumours of templars that felt ill, that heard things. They looked pale, felt dry and feverish. Then communications out of the Gallows — already highly restricted — dried up entirely. And at night, the distant fortress was lit by a faint red glow. The mages might have been dead, but somehow, the Gallows and its templars were changing. Suddenly, the supposed security offered by the enduring presence of a highly disciplined and highly skilled army of templars utterly devoted to their cause wasn’t as comforting as it had first seemed. No one was quite sure what that cause actually was.

Varric leaned back in his chair and settled his hands over his stomach. He offered Cassandra a pained smile. “And there you have it, Seeker. That is the average citizen’s view on events in Kirkwall.”

Cassandra toyed with her empty bowl and eyed the subdued patrons of Varric’s fabled ‘proper Kirkwall tavern’. Perhaps once it had been a lively and cheerful place, but the patrons looked like they were here to forget, not to enjoy themselves.

“It certainly is worrying, even if you have made it more poetic than necessary.”

Varric chuckled. “Storyteller’s habit.” He lifted his chin to indicate the other subdued patrons. “Believe me, I’m as worried as they are.”

“So the Gallows has been sealed off entirely for at least a year.”

“That’s right,” Varric confirmed with a weary nod. “All the old smuggling passages were sealed off when the mage underground was still around, so a ferry is the only way in. And Meredith is completely paranoid. No one gets into the Gallows unless they’re a templar.”

Cassandra raised an eyebrow. “Or an apostate.”

“I wouldn’t recommend that route, Seeker,” Varric replied wryly. “Unless you’re happy to part company with your head.”

“I will bear that in mind,” she replied with a roll of her eyes. Cassandra dug through her belt pouch and pushed a sealed letter across the table to Varric. “I would like you to get in contact with one of your old associates in the Order. Have them pass a message through to the Gallows for me.”

Varric picked up the letter and dabbed off a splash of ale with the corner of his sleeve. “I can try and give it to a Knight-Corporal I used to know who works the dock cordons now, but there’s no guarantee he won’t just throw it in the bay. The templars there are severely lacking in imagination and patience these days.”

Cassandra let out an irritated grunt. “You are supposed to be helping, Varric.”

Varric shrugged in response. “Your best bet is to find a senior officer when they get sent out on business. And no,” he said pre-emptively, “you won’t find one of them anywhere outside the cordons unless they need to be.”

The sonorous sound of bells drifted through the tavern’s door. A few heads perked up and conversation grew slightly more animated, as if people suddenly felt they didn’t need to keep themselves hidden any more. Cassandra looked askance at Varric.

“End of curfew,” he informed her. He hefted his crossbow from where he had leant it against the table and eased himself off his seat. “Daisy will meet us in Lowtown in a couple of hours. Let’s head to the cordons. I’ll drop off your letter, and you can try and spot some weird templars.”

There were a few muted farewells from the few patrons who hadn’t collapsed into a drunken stupor as they left. Cassandra blinked against the brightness outside The Hanged Man. After the dim lantern light inside and the grim tales told by Varric, it seemed somehow wrong to emerge into warm Kirkwall sunshine.

In daytime, she could almost fool herself that Kirkwall was a normal, functional city. It was certainly bustling, even so soon after curfew had been raised. Much as Varric had suggested, it seemed that Kirkwall’s citizens had chosen to crowd into the districts closest to the bay. They hurried through the streets on their way to their places of work, or stopped to chat with friends and neighbours in the shade under colourful awnings stretched between buildings. It gave the city the outward appearance of life. But as Varric led her towards the docks, a templar presence became ubiquitous. Patrolling pairs of Knights-Templar wandered the streets in unpredictable patterns or were stationed on busy squares to cover every angle. Whoever commanded them had applied the requirements for overseeing a Circle on a far grander scale. The same skills of observation and focus they might once have used to watch mages were easily applied to the city’s streets. Behind the full face helms, it was impossible to tell which way they were really looking. They might well be asleep on their feet — the time-honoured tradition of veteran soldiers —  but it didn’t seem likely. Cassandra had no doubt they watched everyone and everything with unyielding vigilance. Circle mages might have been used to living under such unwavering attention, but the average citizen on the street hadn’t yet learnt those skills of studied indifference. The way every passing person hunched their shoulders as they walked by templars would be as painfully obvious to Circle-trained templars as it was to her.

Varric drew to a halt in a market square just beginning to set up for the day. Kirkwall might be a city under martial law, but the awnings were bright and colourful against the unrelieved sandstone that characterised the city. This close to the docks, the market had to receive the first pick of goods coming into the city. But despite the building crowd, the worn clothing and tired faces of the merchants suggested that prosperity was relative. It had been two years since the city had been devastated by the chantry explosion. With no major support from outside Kirkwall, it would be many years before the city recovered, if ever.

A wide avenue sloped down towards a small glimpse of the sparkling waters of the bay. Off in the distance, a handful of merchant ships were just visible, anchored in the water and waiting for access to the docks. The avenue itself was blocked off by a checkpoint manned by a full squad of templars. The first layer of overlapping cordons that kept unwelcome visitors out of Kirkwall and citizens well away from easy access to the Gallows.

Just as with every other templar she had seen, the men manning the cordon were perfectly vigilant. If this had been a Circle, she would have praised them for their discipline. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of it in the context of martial law over a city.

“The templar I knew is in the next street over, but you’ll be better hidden in the market.” Varric made to walk away before turning back to give her a parting warning. “Oh, and don’t speak to a templar if you don’t have to,” he said severely. “It’ll be obvious you’re not a Kirkwaller and you’ll find yourself stuck in some holding cell waiting for an interrogation.”

“Thank you, Varric,” she replied irritably. “Go.”

She watched him hurry off before finding a convenient wall to lean against. She scanned the avenue behind the cordon, catching glimpses in between the bustle of people. A few snatches of movement were visible from beyond the templars stationed at the cordon that suggested there were others marching down a cross street. She sidled a little closer until the view became clearer. Her eyes narrowed as she spotted a templar who seemed to be oddly hunched beneath the weight of something on his shoulders.

Movement at the cordon itself pulled Cassandra’s attention back to the foreground. She growled in frustration. Her movements had made her stand out, even in the concealment of the market. The discreet observations hadn’t been quite discreet enough to avoid the attentions of a Circle-trained templar. A Knight-Templar pointed her out to his superior officer. A helmeted head looked her up and down, pausing significantly on the sword at her hip. The Knight-Corporal stalked over, hand resting casually on the hilt of his own sword. He drew to a halt in front of her and tucked his helm under his arm.

“Is there a problem, Serah?” he drawled.

The templar looked sickly. Prominent red veins peeked out from beneath his collar, but Cassandra barely noticed. She flinched. Tiny splinters of red crystal traced the templar’s gaunt cheekbone in an elegant arc that terminated at his eyebrow. It could almost have been a tattoo had it not been for the way the fragments reflected the light. She could easily have convinced herself that it _was_ a tattoo. But there was no explaining his eyes. His dark irises were hazed over with a faint red gleam, even under the bright sunshine.

The templar’s eyes narrowed in response to her uncontrolled reaction. Pale human skin wrinkled around the crystalline fragments. “Are you new to Kirkwall, Serah?” He gestured the distant Knight-Templar closer. She felt a familiar prickling in her skin. To a mage, it would have been far worse than the gentle pressure she felt as a Seeker. A Templar denial of magic. “All visitors are expected to remain within the docks unless they have been cleared for entry to the city proper by a senior officer of the Order.”

“I-” Cassandra did her best not to gape. A response would call her out as a visitor. But by attempting to silence her, it was obvious that she was being treated as a dangerous potential apostate. No response would be worse. She wondered briefly if she could replicate a convincing Kirkwall accent.

Varric bustled up out of the market square before Cassandra could speak. “She’s been in Kirkwall as long as I have, Knight-Corporal,” he offered hastily, “She just doesn’t get out much. She lives on the outskirts. You know how it is these days.” Varric tugged her away and lowered his voice to an angry hiss. “I told you not to be too obvious. You’re lucky it didn’t take long to pass on the letter.”

Cassandra tossed a parting glance over her shoulder at the Knight-Corporal. He watched them leave, tall enough to see over the heads of the people filling up the market. Suspicion tightened every line of his posture as he settled his helm back on his head. He folded his arms and exchanged a few brief words with his subordinate. The Knight-Templar saluted and disappeared past the cordon towards the docks.

Varric hadn’t failed to note the movement either. “Let’s get as far from here as possible,” he muttered.

She followed him as they retreated back into the maze of streets, weaving past the few people heading towards the market. Varric darted quickly into a tight alley strewn with shards of glass and rubble.

“I suppose you were telling the truth,” Cassandra said grudgingly as she followed. She shuddered at the thought that all of Varric’s information might be true after all. “You say this is only a recent development?”

He nodded. “It only became really noticeable in the last year or so.” Varric shrugged helplessly. “There haven’t been any shipments from Orzammar in two years, so they must have been using red lyrium for that long. I have no idea why it took so long for anyone to notice anything odd.”

“Then guess, Varric,” Cassandra ordered. “You are the closest I have to an expert.”

Varric exhaled. “Sure. Templars take lyrium every day, right?” He ducked his head and kicked at a stone on the floor of the alley as they passed. “Red lyrium drove my brother mad. It almost got me too, and I barely held it for a minute. But Meredith must have had it for six years and she was only slightly insane for most of that time. My guess is that templars have built up some kind of … immunity, but actually _drinking_ the stuff can’t be good for them.”

“Even normal lyrium given to templars by the Chantry has harmful effects in the long term,” she admitted. “But nothing like this.”

Varric gave her a sidelong look. “So I’ve heard. I’m surprised to hear you admit that to an outsider.”

“Whether it is the correct decision or not, the fact is not widely known. I do not want to know how you found out.” She gave him a brief glare before following him down another alley. By this point, she was thoroughly lost. She could only hope that they had dodged whatever pursuit might have been imminent. “I find it hard to believe that no one in the Order protested.”

“It’s not like they could know what red lyrium would do. Maybe they didn’t think it would be any worse than normal lyrium. And even if they did, what difference would that make, Seeker?” Varric asked incredulously. He stopped in front of a door and dug a set of lockpicks out of his pocket. “I’m no expert on Templar hierarchy, but aren’t they supposed to obey orders? Meredith was executing people outright by that point.”

“Hawke had the influence to protest. Kirkwall would have stood by its Champion if she had forced Meredith to back down,” she noted, before wincing. Perhaps not the best comment to have made to a long term friend of Hawke’s.

A stricken look crossed Varric’s face. For a brief moment he seemed to shrink into himself. He chuckled darkly and turned his back on Cassandra to crouch in front of the lock. “Yeah. That went well,” he muttered.

The lock clicked and Varric shoved open the door harder than strictly necessary, cutting off any belated attempt at an apology as he slipped inside.

The air inside was musty, as if the building had been uninhabited for months. A handful of scattered belongings and an unfinished meal on the table suggested that whoever had once lived here had fled in a hurry. Perhaps they had joined the ranks of refugees fleeing the city. Or perhaps they had been suspected of apostasy.

Varric pushed the door closed behind him, relocking it behind them. “Daisy will meet us here soon,” he informed her brusquely.

Cassandra took a few awkward steps towards Varric. “I… I apologise, Varric. It was a thoughtless comment.”

Varric rounded on her, face twisted into an angry mask. “Hawke just wanted a normal life, but people kept dragging her into their problems. It shouldn’t have been her job to stop a Templar Knight-Commander from going mad any more than it was her job to help stop a Qunari invasion.” He stabbed an accusing finger towards Cassandra. “So don’t blame her for getting herself killed doing something that the Chantry should have been handling.”

Cassandra raised her hands in apology. “I am sorry, Varric,” she replied cautiously. “Diplomacy has never been a strength of mine.”

“Yeah. Clearly,” he snapped. He stalked over to a corner of a room and slumped into a dusty chair.

Cassandra wavered hesitantly between attempting another stumbling apology and finding somewhere else to wait. She hadn’t been chosen to investigate matters in Kirkwall for her delicate touch. Hopefully solving the problems in Kirkwall would be enough of an apology. It was a vain hope that it would fill the gaps left by the death of a friend, but it was all she could do.

* * *

Merrill’s arrival was greeted with gratitude by both Varric and Cassandra. Her presence had been more than enough to break the thick tension in the air. She might have been a blood mage — everything that Cassandra would have been fighting against in a normal situation — but her cheerfulness completely wiped out the black cloud that had been hovering over Varric’s head. He chose to ignore Cassandra completely in favour of letting the elf’s bright chatter wash over him. Cassandra couldn’t recall ever having met such an accommodating maleficar. Then again, most blood mages she met were trying to kill her.

Merrill led them through a tangle of streets into an area of the city that seemed to be only sparsely inhabited. The people here didn’t seem half as relaxed as those she had seen in the streets and the market this morning. There were still signs of life. The muted sound of conversation from an inn. A market square, albeit not especially crowded or well stocked. A group of workers repairing a building that had to have been damaged by the chantry explosion. But it was far more subdued. These were people who had to rebuild their homes after tragedy whilst facing the worry that they might fall prey to a blood mage.

Her suspicion that they had left the protection of territory firmly under the Templar’s control was confirmed at the sight of another bloody hand daubed on the wall of a building. Her hand dropped unconsciously to the hilt of her sword and she found herself scanning the face of passing people with a touch more caution. Suddenly the constant vigilance of the templars on the streets seemed far more understandable. Templar resistance to the spells cast by a blood mage was far less than their resistance to magic drawn from the Fade, but in any other chapter of the Order, the chances of encountering an actual blood mage were low. That wasn’t the case here. Any templar living under the constant and deadly threat of being called to combat blood magic at any moment might feel a touch of paranoia, above and beyond that engendered by a life in the Circle. Add the negative effects of long term lyrium use and the past experiences of both the Gallows’ commanding officers to influence their outlook, and it was a recipe for disaster.

They walked through the entrance of a small courtyard nestled right against Kirkwall’s cliffs. The towering black stone cast the entire district in shadow, but even then, the courtyard felt far colder than it should have done. It seemed to enforce as stark a class difference as the Orlesian court. Nobles above in the bright sunshine bathing the cliffs. Commoners in the crowded streets below.

Cassandra followed Merrill as she stepped lightly over bits of rubble scattered over the flagstones. This far from the busy and well-protected districts surrounding the docks, Kirkwall looked far more like the ruin Cassandra had been expecting. The entire front facing of a building on the far side of the courtyard had sheared away, leaving the darkened interior exposed. Half a wall had collapsed over the opposite entrance to the courtyard, partially blocking it. The other buildings crouched in the shadows of the small courtyard hardly looked better. Shattered windows and spidering cracks suggested that every building was on the brink of a similar collapse. The detritus caught in doorways and corners suggested that the place had long since been abandoned. Given how close the district was to one of the multitude of entrances into Darktown, that was probably sensible. Lowtown might have been cleared of the possessed corpses left behind in the wake of the chantry explosion, but the collapsed passageways of Darktown had to be crawling with the dead and maleficarum.

The hairs on the back of Cassandra’s neck prickled as they approached a relatively undamaged building. She didn’t need Merrill to tell her that they had arrived. Even a non-mage could feel something … off in the air. By the time they reached the door — a battered slab of wood hanging off one hinge — the air had been thickened to an almost tangible consistency, filled with a nauseating mix of the smells of decay and copper. Cassandra’s lip curled in disgust. Blood magic.

“Wait outside, Merrill,” she ordered. “Varric, with me.”

“But-” Merrill began to protest.

“Wait,” Cassandra snapped. Merrill might not have cast the spell, but there was a large part of her that flatly refused to have a professed blood mage in the same room as a blood magic spell.

Cassandra drew her sword and pushed the door open cautiously. Varric trailed close behind, crossbow covering the corners.

The room they entered seemed to take up almost the entire lower floor. It was easy enough to see in a glance that they were the only people in the room. Or at least, the only ones still alive.

“Well, shit,” Varric murmured faintly. “I’ll, ah, keep an eye on the street. You do whatever it is that Seekers do.”

Cassandra nodded absently and surveyed the room. She wrinkled her nose against the overpowering scent of decay. Thick arcs of blood painted the walls and ceiling a deep red, like a madman’s attempt at writing. The few scraps of furniture left in the room had been violently shoved to the far end, leaving a haphazard jumble of wood fragments against the wall. Two bodies sprawled across the centre of that wide cleared space, arms reaching towards the heart of a vast rune that took up a quarter of the room. Even in what little light filtered through the open door, it glistened wetly, whilst the splashes of blood on the wall had long since dried. The odd bubble of blood popped lazily on the viscous surface. Whatever it was intended to do, the spell was still active.

What little of the rune Cassandra could see underneath the bodies sent a shiver down her spine. Blood mages could cast any common spell using their own blood without any risk of weakening themselves. But where their own strength wasn’t enough, a mage could either use lyrium — surely difficult to find in Kirkwall outside of the Gallows these days — or another source of power. If this spell had used blood from two people, they had either wasted vast amounts of blood, or had cast a powerful spell. And whatever it was meant to do, it was nothing she had ever seen before. Certainly not a standard elemental rune trap fuelled by forbidden magic rather than tied to the fade. Not a hex either. Either one might have made sense in a location where templar patrols were expected, but this was an isolated location and the blood mage had made no effort to conceal their efforts.

Cassandra carefully skirted the edges of the rune and crouched by the elf’s body. Pale and completely bloodless, face twisted in a mask of abject terror. The human was much the same. They hadn’t been caught by surprise. Judging by her bloodstained clothing, she would have guessed the woman to be a noble. The elf was well-dressed enough that he could have been a prosperous resident of the alienage, but given how run down the district had seemed, it was more likely that he was a favoured servant in Hightown.

Cassandra settled back on her heels and inspected the two bodies with a frown. “Were you brought all the way down to Lowtown to fuel this spell?” she mused to herself. “Why here?”

Merrill had said that runes were being left all over the city. Perhaps location was important. She wondered how long the blood mages had been laying these runes. If every one took two bodies to cast, the death toll could be vast. Hightown could be emptying out at a nauseatingly fast pace.

Cassandra shook her head and stood up. Now more than ever, she needed to speak with Knight-Commander Meredith. Finding a pattern would be an impossible task without the skill and resources of the Order.

“Hey, Seeker,” Varric hissed from the open doorway. He ratcheted a bolt into his crossbow. “We’ve got company. Templars.”

Cassandra’s eyes darted about the hovel. The narrow windows were too high to reach. The front door was their only entrance and exit. “How many?”

“You don’t want to know,” Varric replied grimly. For the first time since Cassandra had met him, he looked genuinely afraid.

“Varric,” she snapped.

“Eight,” he replied unhappily. “A couple of big brutes, so there’ll be a senior officer with them. Meredith must have sent someone to investigate.” He shuffled restlessly in the doorway, fingers twitching towards the trigger of his crossbow. “Come on, Seeker. Let’s get out of here.”

Cassandra’s eyes narrowed speculatively. “This may be a good opportunity. You and Merrill need to leave. I will stay.”

Varric’s eyes widened. “Maker’s balls, are you serious? An opportunity to get yourself killed, Seeker! These are not the friendly types.”

“You said yourself that my best chance would be to speak with a senior officer. Now seems ideal.”

“Now!? I knew you were crazy,” Varric hissed, eyes darting away from Cassandra and back outside. “They’re not going to let you just walk up and say hello to a senior officer, Seeker. This is blood mage territory and you’re standing next to a blood magic rune! They’ll attack first, ask questions never.”

Cassandra stalked towards the entrance and pushed Varric out ahead of her. “The Divine sent me to gather information, Varric. This is my chance. Leave. Now.”

Varric shook his head and muttered a string of expletives under his breath. “Daisy! Let’s get out of here.” He turned a scowl on Cassandra. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Seeker.”

Merrill cast an apprehensive look at Cassandra as she darted after Varric. “Don’t get yourself killed, Seeker Pentaghast,” she called out anxiously.

Cassandra watched them duck under the collapsed wall at the far end of the square before turning to the only clear entrance into the courtyard.

“I hope so too,” she muttered.

There was no ignoring the odd echo that accompanied the marching footsteps this time. It was a distinctly crystalline sound, higher and sharper than the thud of metal boots.

Even having seen the deformity on the Knight-Corporal at the docks, Cassandra hadn’t truly believed that all of Varric’s information could have been correct. That disbelief was shattered as she caught sight of the approaching templars. She blinked, unable to accept what she was seeing.

The first pair seemed almost normal, if you could somehow ignore the errant spurs of scarlet crystal that burst from shoulders and elbows. The following pairs escalated in deformation until they could hardly even be called human any more. Some hunched under the weight of crystal sprouting out of their bodies. Others dragged arms burdened with crystal spikes so sharp that they didn’t even need to carry a blade. A pair of hulking brutes took up the rear, barely even recognisable as human. Scraps of what armour and cloth could fit across their bulging forms was the only indicator that these had ever been templars. And to a person, red eyes gleamed with unnatural and malevolent brightness from behind the slits of their helms.

Warped and jagged limbs. Red crystal that held a light of its own. Polished armour. They were monstrosities marching in a sick parody of a normal templar squad. There was no other description that suited them. She could have called them abominations, but there was no demon that had ever transformed its host as these templars had been deformed.

Cassandra felt a visceral surge of horror to match the first time she had seen an abomination. She stumbled reflexively back into the hovel with an exclamation of disgust, reaching for her sword and the shield at her back. “Andraste be my guide,” she whispered. Forcing them to approach one by one through the narrow door was the only way she could hope to control this situation.

Varric had said there would be a senior officer, and she believed him. But she couldn’t even see one, let alone speak to them. Just eight monstrosities that had once been Knights-Templar.

Her retreat was too late to avoid their attention. A high pitched shriek with nothing human left in it set her teeth on edge. Her heart thundered in her chest. The natural fear of the unknown that she had thought lost after years in the Seekers of Truth. Footsteps accelerated to a rapid sprint, accompanied by that crystalline echo.

Cassandra resettled her hand about the grip of her sword and eased the shield into a more comfortable position. She clamped down on her rapid breathing and retreated to the tranquillity granted by years of experience. This would not be easy, but a Seeker’s job never was.


	3. Red Templars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassandra has her first true encounter with the templars of Kirkwall.

> _Treat any red lyrium you encounter as if it were poison. Do not go near it, do not attempt to destroy it... and most importantly, do not attempt to use it._
> 
> _—From a partially burned letter by an unknown writer, affixed with the Grey Warden seal._

Amongst those who had even heard of the Seekers of Truth, there was an assumption that their abilities were much like those of a templar. There was some truth to that. Seekers shared many of the same abilities as templars, in some respects stronger, in some respects weaker without the augmented strength granted by lyrium. But there was one ability that seekers could develop that they had long used to exert control over templars. Seekers could set the lyrium in a templar or mage’s blood aflame.

When the first templar advanced into the doorway, shield and sword raised protectively, crystal spurs glittering in the sun, that was precisely what Cassandra tried. She tugged on that extra sense, although it nearly slipped away from her grasp, like trying to hold on to shards of glass coated in oil. At the very least, the templar should have stumbled. He should have given some sign of the pain that had to have been wracking his body. The lyrium was there, pumped around his body by his heart, but he kept advancing as if he couldn’t feel a thing.

Fights could never go as predicted. Every trained warrior knew that. Cassandra absorbed the surprise and stood firm as he launched his assault. She found herself shocked all over again. Her shield shuddered under the impact of blows that were too fast and too strong. He had all the skill of a trained templar, all the familiar blocks and parries, but augmented beyond normal human ability.

Over his shoulder, Cassandra caught sight of the rapid approach of others, far more dangerous looking than this almost-normal templar knight. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to move a little faster, to strike a little harder. Her muscles burned, but seekers were _better_ than templars. She could not be beaten.

An opening revealed itself when she caught the edge of a crystal spur on her shield. Her sword leapt up to pierce through the weak spot in the armour. Impossibly, he kept standing through what should have been a killing blow. She knocked him back with her shield, sword catching on links of chainmail as it ripped a bloody hole in his body. He stumbled and fell with a wet cough.

Another leapt over the first templar before he had even finished falling. Crystal spines nearly double the length of his arms slashed the air in front of Cassandra’s face. She staggered back, away from the doorway, opening up her rudimentary choke point. A big brute ducked to pass through the doorway close behind, crystal spines scratching furrows in the lintel.

Diverted by her shield, the templar’s crystalline arm missed impaling her by a hair’s breadth. The jagged spur caught on her side and scraped across her ribs, leaving a fiery line of agony in its wake. Cassandra let out a harsh bark of pain and flinched back as another crystal-encrusted limb spiked up for her heart. There was a screech as she caught it on her blade. For a moment, she couldn’t even be sure whether it was the templar or the impact of crystal on metal. She knocked the templar back a pace with her shield and hooked his leg, sending him tumbling to the floor with a crystalline grunt. There was an audible crack as she snapped a steel-toed boot into the side of his head. She stabbed her sword down into his exposed throat to finish him off.

Her vision went black for a moment as a heavy fist thudded into her stomach. She was thrown backwards, breath leaving in an audible rush of air as she collided with the wall. Her sword was sent flying from her hand. She forced herself to her feet, hunting desperately for her weapon. She growled as she spotted it in the hands of the templar brute and darted around the rune for a broken shard of wood.

A templar sprouting razor sharp ridges of crystal from elbow to shoulder crowded around the other side of the rune. He was followed closely by a monstrosity with hands deformed into claws and bearing crystal that followed his spine and bloomed across his shoulders like a mantle. Her eyes darted from one to the other, attempting to plot some kind of escape that didn’t involve her blood joining what had already been spilt to form the rune.

The chunk of wood caught the first templar’s sword with a heavy thud that came close to splitting the thick piece in two. He crowded up towards her, red eyes glaring from behind the eye slit of his helm. Cassandra’s arms wavered under the sheer inhuman force he exerted and was forced a step backwards. He tugged downwards sharply and finished the stroke, breaking her makeshift weapon completely and leaving her with a useless chunk of wood in either hand. His sword drew back for a killing blow. Cassandra whispered a fragment of prayer.

“Wait,” a stern voice barked sharply. The words were edged with a grating buzz that hummed at the edge of hearing, as if a swarm of wasps had somehow managed coherent speech. “I want to speak to our unexpectedly capable stranger.”

The sword stopped in mid air. Fiery eyes glared at her with a flare of unimaginable hatred. In that moment, there didn’t seem to be anything human left in him.

“Yes, Ser,” he bit out, voice more like the shriek of crystal than anything natural.

Cassandra offered a brief prayer of gratitude and reached a tentative hand to a fiery line of pain on her side. She had been overwhelmed within seconds, but the Maker had somehow seen fit to allow her foolish plan to succeed when she should have ended up dead.

The templar sheathed his sword and grabbed her in one fluid movement, unnatural strength allowing him to restrain her easily. Steel gauntlets bit into her far too tightly. The templar was making his displeasure known in the only way he could. She winced at the fiery heat that bled through her leathers from his grip on her arm and shoulder.

She was dragged around the rune to face a templar observing dispassionately from the hovel’s doorway with his arms folded, not even bothering to draw his sword and shield. It was galling to be considered such a negligible threat. He pushed himself off from where he had been leaning against the doorframe. A hulking monstrosity loomed up behind him, whilst another pair of crystal-infested monstrosities fell in at either side. A protection detail for the senior officer. Their unnaturally gleaming eyes flicked between the officer and rapt attention on her, more like the obedience of a dog than anything human. Fiery eyes were alight with hunger for the order to finish the job. But some fragment of what they had once been kept them leashed to the orders of a superior.

Cassandra tugged at the grip on her arms, testing the templar’s unnatural strength against hers. There was a low buzzing laugh of amusement in her ear and the grip tightened a little further.

“Try again and I will break your arm, stranger,” the templar murmured.

Cassandra ignored the threat and assessed the senior templar. As monstrous as the others looked, the man who approached seemed almost untouched by the corruption. Where the others were clad in the armour of a rank-and-file Knight-Templar, or what was left of it, his was the armour of a Knight-Captain, perfectly polished and presented. Cassandra braced herself as he removed his winged helm, expecting to see yet more horrific growths. She was almost disappointed when a human face looked back at her.  Somehow, that outward humanity was far worse, knowing that it simply held the potential for greater corruption. Deathly pale skin was coloured with a feverish flush across his cheeks. His eyes glittered a malevolent scarlet from deeply shadowed sockets. Despite his relative youth, his brow and the corners of his eyes were marred by deep lines of old pain. But he seemed free of the outcroppings of crystal that disfigured his subordinates. Without those, he seemed smaller, less deadly. Cassandra had a feeling that was a dangerous assumption, even if she remained confident that she could have taken him in single combat.

He gave her a measuring look. “Knight-Corporal Lahst did mention that a woman had been skulking around the dock cordons earlier today,” he said flatly. “You seem to match the description.”

He reached out a hand for her sword. The hulking templar monstrosity that had sent her flying lumbered over and handed it over almost gently. Mild curiosity crossed the Knight-Captain’s face as he inspected it.

“Lyrium-steel of Circle make.” He looked across at her with glittering eyes. The calm regard in the face of the barely-restrained savagery of the other templars in the room was disconcerting. “Clearly you’re no blood mage. Not a templar either, despite the blade. The guard never investigated blood magic, even before we took over their duties. Who are you then?”

Something told her they would not welcome the news that she was the Divine’s Right Hand, but at least she had been given her chance to speak to a senior officer. “An interested third party,” she offered. “I have come on behalf of the Chantry to speak with Knight-Commander Meredith.”

The Knight-Captain raised an eyebrow. He hefted the blade in a hand and tested the balance. “This is a fine weapon.”

He whipped it up to rest the tip below her breastbone. The razor sharp point dug in through the light leather armour to stop just short of drawing blood. Cassandra knew precisely how sharp her sword was. With the unnatural strength that seemed to have been granted to these corrupted templars, it wouldn’t take much effort to push the blade through her chest. Yet despite the threat of violence, the Knight-Captain’s eyes were empty where the other templars had looked hungry for blood.

Cassandra glared at him, refusing to react to the obvious threat. “Perhaps I stole it,” she replied contemptuously.

“Perhaps,” the Knight-Captain allowed with a curt nod. “But you wielded it like someone with a lifetime of training. You killed two highly-trained and deadly templars before you were restrained.” A shadow of regret crossed his face as he spoke. He lowered the blade and handed it back to the hulking monstrosity at his shoulder. “With that accent you’re clearly not a Chevalier. Not from the Order. But perhaps a Seeker of Truth.”

Cassandra grimaced. Clearly it had been too much to hope for true anonymity in the face of people the Chantry had trained to be observant and mindful of details. “A reasonable conclusion. But as I said, I have been sent to do nothing more than speak with Knight-Commander Meredith.”

The templars in the room shifted restlessly. Cassandra felt the tightening of the grip on her arm. Errant shards of crystal bit into the muscle of her arm, drawing blood. She gritted her teeth as her bones began to creak under the force.

“Enough!” the Knight-Captain barked, the whip crack of the order cowing the templar into submission. The force on her arm and shoulder lightened from crushing to merely immovable.

Cassandra clenched and unclenched a hand that had suddenly gone numb. Unsurprisingly, a renegade chapter of the Templar Order outside the Chantry’s influence did not trust her to tell the truth.

“You will forgive my men,” he continued evenly. His fingers drummed a beat on the hilt of his sword, seemingly without him being aware. A flicker of disgust forced Cassandra to look away. Delicate crystal needles pierced through the tips of his gauntlets, turning his fingers into vicious talons. His disfigurement might be subtler, but he was as corrupted as the rest of them. “These are Knight-Commander Meredith’s shock troops. Gentle is not their speciality.”

“Shock troops are not generally required in the Templar Order,” Cassandra retorted irritably. The Order might have been the Chantry’s military arm, but they were nominally a defensive force, not offensive. As if she needed any more evidence of how far these templars had strayed.

“This is a dangerous region for a member of the Order these days. Any templars seen as more … valuable,” his mouth twisted in distaste at the word, “are expected to be properly protected. We cannot afford losses.”

“So you are considered valuable,” Cassandra replied. It was a vaguely useful piece of information, given how Meredith seemed to have been treating her men as disposable assets in her war against the blood mages in Kirkwall.

The Knight-Captain smirked. “I can’t see how that information will do you much good, but yes, it would seem I am still considered valuable.” He drew himself to attention and saluted with enough precision to make the gesture a sarcastic one. “Knight-Captain Cullen. Second-in-command at the Gallows, for what little that title is worth.” He inclined his head in a cordial nod of acknowledgement. “You are a little late, Seeker.”

Cassandra blinked, nonplussed by his politeness. Meredith’s own second-in-command. The Maker had been far kinder than she could have expected. She gathered her thoughts enough for a simple response. “Late?” she demanded. “For what?”

He ignored the question and swept past her to inspect the corpses beyond. Despite the pallor and feverishness of his skin, he moved with the restless energy they all seemed to share, albeit unhindered by the outcroppings of crystal that plagued the others. And with every movement, his templars followed him with unwavering attention, heads shifting to keep him in sight. They seemed as much minders as bodyguards.

The Knight-Captain crouched by a body, shifting aside torn clothing with incongruous delicacy, as if he had had to relearn the use of his disfigured hands. With cloth moved aside, it was possible to see the wounds beneath. A deep slash across the throat. Matched slashes across the lower arms. No ragged edges. It had been a razor sharp blade. The blood mage had wanted the body drained as quickly and efficiently as possible. Definitely a single powerful spell.

Again, as if unaware of it, the Knight-Captain hummed a discordant melody under his breath, the dissonant notes almost but not quite fitting together. He stood, movements unnaturally smooth and graceful, and pushed the corpses to one side with the toe of his boot to reveal the full extent of the blood rune beneath.

“Kirkwall has always had more than its fair share of blood magic. But this?” he swept a hand towards the rune, lip curling with disgust as he surveyed the room. “We are finding more and more of these. For every rune we destroy, another two emerge. Perhaps a Seeker can offer insight.”

“I am surprised to see that you still care,” Cassandra replied irritably. “From what little I have seen, you have fallen far.”

The Knight-Captain flicked an exasperated look over to her. The red gleam in his eyes turned the expression baleful. “You think we’re renegades. That might be true, but I will do my duty, as I have always done. ‘Blessed are they who stand before the corrupt and the wicked and do not falter’,” he quoted. “We are the only thing standing between this city and the abyss.”

“Do not throw the Chant at me, templar. You have strayed too far to claim the righteous path. The city has been dragged into the abyss with you,” she snapped.

“Perhaps.” He shrugged non-committally as if he had heard the accusation before and began to walk away from the rune. The air deadened suddenly and Cassandra staggered, ears popping. Dust and fragments of wood were thrown back in a wide ring around the Knight-Captain, chased by the copper tang of blood magic. Bloody sparks of lightening played in the air around him.

Cassandra’s eyes narrowed. However these templars had been corrupted, their abilities had clearly been strengthened far beyond pure lyrium. No one but a mage should have felt a burst of cleansing energy as a physical force.

She hadn’t even realised how oppressive the feel of death in the air was until it faded. If a Templar cleanse could damage even part of a blood magic rune, it had to have been linked to the Fade. A summoning rune of some kind, perhaps. Her inner seeker gathered the information for further use. Her anger faded slightly to leave her with a deep-seated worry. She was beginning to believe that a renegade chapter of corrupted templars was the least of Kirkwall’s problems. They could argue about the righteous path for all eternity, but there were certainly united in recognition of blood magic’s corruption.

“You should destroy the rune entirely,” she commented insistently. “Blood magic cannot be cleansed so easily.”

The Knight-Captain turned a scowl on her. “I’m quite aware of how to handle blood magic, Seeker,” he snapped. “Knight-Templar Yurin. Remove the rune and then report back to me. The Seeker will accompany us to the Gallows.”

The hold on her arms tightened. One arm was pulled behind her back to restrain her. Then pulled further back until her vision went white with agony. She kept silent for as long as she could, but couldn’t stop the shout of pain as she felt her shoulder pop free of its socket.

There was the cracking impact of metal on crystal, followed by a crash and the sound of a steel blade being drawn. Almost instantly, the pain died from white-hot agony to an angry throbbing. Cassandra clutched at her limp arm and turned around. The Knight-Captain loomed over the fallen templar, blade resting at his exposed throat.

His slow smile was cold and dangerous. “Do not forget your place, Knight-Templar Brinn.”

The templar spread his hands, palms open. An oddly human gesture of submission given how crystal spurs had warped his arms almost beyond recognition.

“Yes, Knight-Captain,” he replied in flat acquiescence, his shrieking voice grating against Cassandra’s ears.

“Perhaps they are not as much under your control as you would claim,” she accused through gritted teeth.

The Knight-Captain stepped back and sheathed his sword, allowing the cowed templar to ease himself cautiously back onto his feet.

“They obey. They simply suffer from an excess of enthusiasm.” He offered another cold smile. “You will find I am not so easily baited. But I would advise caution. Others are less willing or able to control the baser urges that red lyrium encourages.”

Cassandra forced herself to stand a little straighter, feigning ignorance of the dangerous shifting of the Knight-Captain’s bodyguards. “I'm not interested in your excuses," she snapped with all the imperious confidence of a veteran Seeker. "I expect to be given leave to speak to Knight-Commander Meredith to discuss the current state of Kirkwall and the actions of the Order these past years. Unless you intend to deny the Chantry entirely?”

The Knight-Captain looked briefly amused. “I'm not sure you'll find her as willing to cooperate as you hope. But eventually. There are questions you must answer first. Far safer to speak in the Gallows than out here.” He inclined his head to her dangling arm. “I cannot claim any great skill in battlefield medicine, but I can fix that, if you like.”

Cassandra flinched away. “Do not touch me.”

The Knight-Captain rolled his eyes and sighed, as if they were friends rather than prisoner and captor. “So be it. There are some healers remaining in the Gallows.”

Arms clamped around her shoulders, indifferent to her gasp of pain as her dislocated arm was wrenched about again. She was hauled back out into the derelict courtyard, templars forming up around her.

There was a loud clatter from the direction of the blocked street. Cassandra’s breath caught in her throat. She prayed that Varric had had the sense to get as far away as possible. The last thing she wanted was to be responsible for his death. Of Merrill she was still less certain.

“Friends of yours?” the Knight-Captain asked with mild curiosity.

“I came here alone,” she replied curtly.

He raised an eyebrow that indicated just how little he believed that claim. What little she had seen of the city proved that it was an incomprehensible maze that it would likely take years to learn. A madman could have designed a more logical street layout.

“Check it, Ser Brinn,” he ordered.

The templar loped off, crystal spines glittering in the sunshine. He vaulted smoothly over the collapsed wall and disappeared into the shadows beyond. Cassandra wavered between hoping he found something particularly malicious and hoping there was nothing to find.

There was a familiar high shriek followed almost immediately by a hissing rattle. A shade. She darted a look over to the Knight-Captain. He didn’t seem surprised. An oppressive hum at the very edges of her hearing filled the air, setting her teeth on edge. With quickly barked orders, he led the rest of his templars towards the threat, leaving a single templar brute to keep her restrained.

Cassandra fidgeted restlessly, forced to do nothing more than stand and listen. She pointedly ignored the living wall of crystal and steel looming behind her. She supposed she could have made some attempt to escape, but that seemed rather pointless. It might not be the most conventional way into the Gallows, but it was certainly faster than hoping a message would get through to Meredith. Given the way Kirkwall’s Knight-Commander had ignored all previous missives sent to her, the chances were high that Cassandra would have been waiting a long time.

There were a number of bright red flashes in quick succession followed by a crackling roar of demonic pain. Cassandra twitched forwards, chafing at being forced to allow others to fight for her.

If anything, the templar left behind with Cassandra seemed even more restless than Cassandra herself. His fingers clenched convulsively on her shoulder as she bounced forwards on her toes, almost pushing her forwards rather than restraining her.

The sound of combat died out and the templars reappeared from behind the collapsed wall one by one. Cassandra took guilty pleasure in noting that Ser Brinn had caught the brunt of a blast of flame from a rage demon. That withered when he seemed to move as effortlessly as he had before.

The Knight-captain flicked steaming demon ichor off his sword blade and sheathed it at his back. “Let’s move,” he barked. It didn’t take an observant person to note that his voice was tight with pent up aggression.

“Does this happen often?” Cassandra asked as she was pushed forwards to join their quick marching pace. It was not a good sign if demonic incursions were so common, especially given the suggestion that the Veil was intentionally being weakened.

The look he turned on her visibly blazed with hostility and Cassandra found her hand dropping to where her sword hilt should have been. It seemed to take a visible effort for him to tamp down on the intensity until it was left as a dull simmer of anger. “Enough questions, Seeker,” he replied tersely.

She held her tongue. Nominally she had the right of command even over the Knight-Commander, but it would be better not to test that just yet. She certainly didn’t want to see just how easy it was to bait him. Certainly not with barely-controlled monstrosities surrounding her, eager for the order to strike. She gave up on any further attempts to ask questions. There would be time enough to gather information when they reached the Gallows.

People scurried out of the way as they marched into the more populous areas of the city. Not a single person dared to look in her direction for anything more than a brief glance, as if they feared that it would draw attention down on themselves. Whether it was the presence of Meredith’s supposed shock troops, or a senior templar officer, no one was eager to be nearby.

The streets were silent and empty once they passed through the first of the cordons. Whoever might once have lived here, they were long gone. The homes along their route were boarded up and sealed off. The odd one or two seemed to have been established as guard posts or way stations for templar patrols. Here, behind the cordons that kept citizens away, corrupted templars were commonplace. Crystal glittered in the sunshine. Too-bright eyes watched her through the slits of their helms as they saluted the Knight-Captain. Patrols marching through the streets were accompanied by a crystalline echo as much as they were by the metallic impacts of armoured boots on stone. She even saw the occasional squads armed in nondescript leather rather than proper templar plate, albeit still led by a templar Knight-Corporal. She had the sneaking suspicion that they were auxiliaries rather than proper templars.

They passed without comment through the inner cordons into the docks. Here, signs of life became apparent again, but far more subdued than in the populated regions of the city. Cassandra grimaced in distaste as dockworkers offered rough attempts at salutes and stood to one side to allow them to pass. The few merchants who had chosen to leave their ships were even worse. Their bows were all exaggerated obsequiousness that was completely ignored by every one of the templars. The only time they paid attention was when a passer-by didn’t move out of their path quickly enough. Crystalline growls of irritation were usually more than enough to have them scurrying out of their way. One thing was quite obvious. The people of Kirkwall didn’t trust the Order. They feared it. Cassandra could hardly blame them. When you could be spirited away for even the suspicion of apostasy or collaboration, safety was a tenuous thing at best.

A wide expanse of the bay finally revealed itself once they passed through yet another cordon into a private wharf. Cassandra ground to a halt and almost stumbled when the templar behind her pushed her forwards again. It was one thing to read the reports out of Kirkwall. It was quite another to see the Gallows in person.

There was still some remnant of the brutal edifice it had once been. But now it seemed an almost organic structure, crouching in the waters. Fully half of the building seemed to have been lost beneath clusters of bloody scarlet crystal shards. They jutted out of the sandstone at odd angles and crowned the roof, all reaching for the warmth of the noon sun. Captured light seethed within the depths of the crystal, highlighting smooth facets and sharp edges. Despite the bright Kirkwall sunshine, the entire structure seemed to have a smouldering light of its own. Even the water seemed to have been corrupted. Thick streamers of mist illuminated a faint red wreathed the lower half and curled around shards of crystal. The growths had almost entirely overtaken the squat tower of the Templar garrison, until it was more sharp crystalline shards than stone, but the central tower of what had once been the Circle was almost as thoroughly overwhelmed.

The longer she looked, the more unsettling the sight became. It was an discomfiting, unnatural presence in the bay, oozing raw malevolence on a far grander scale than the restrained hostility of the templars that called it home. She offered a brief prayer of thanks that the fortress was isolated from the rest of Kirkwall. An entire city taken over by that corruption was more than she could bear to imagine.

Cassandra’s lip curled. She had fought blood mages by the hundred, wiping out their corruption without a second thought. Killed abominations. Destroyed demons. Fought a dragon and won. Those dangers could hardly be called commonplace, but they were an expected part of service as a Seeker.  As much as it grated on her to admit it, fighting dragons was a Pentaghast staple. But how eagerly and enthusiastically these templars had turned away from the Maker’s service was far more chilling than any of those. Justice had to be served. She just wasn’t quite sure what justice _was_ in this city. Her instincts insisted that these templars deserved the very harshest penalties, but that would leave the city vulnerable. Perhaps that had been Meredith’s intention, to keep the city so finely balanced that she could not be removed from power. She would have to trust the Maker to guide her hand.

“ _This_ is the Gallows?” she asked of the Knight-Captain, not bothering to hide her disgust. That attitude had landed her in trouble in the past, but she didn’t especially care.

The Knight-Captain turned a faint smirk on Cassandra in response to her acidic tone. The controlled aggression in his gaze had been replaced by bitter amusement. “Indeed it is, Seeker. Home of the Templar Order in Kirkwall.” He inclined his head to the templar behind her, drawing a frown from Cassandra. “People have reacted … poorly when brought in close proximity to so much red lyrium. We can’t be sure how a Seeker might cope. Far safer for us all if you’re not concious for the journey.”

Cassandra was given no time to react. The world went black.


	4. The Gallows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassandra is given a chance to gather more information on the Templars in Kirkwall.

 

> _We are sundered_
> 
> _We are crippled_
> 
> _We are polluted_
> 
> _We endure_
> 
> _—Whispers Written in Red Lyrium_

Cassandra woke in a cell just large enough for a tall man to stretch out lengthways in either direction. She coughed, dry heat scratching at the back of her throat, and levered herself up from a musty bedroll into a seated position. It took a confused few moments to recall where exactly she was and what she was doing there. The air seemed to be vibrating with a low hum just beyond her hearing that made it hard to hold onto her train of thought and left her inexplicably anxious. It was galling to think that a Seeker could be so easily brought low.

She made a vain attempt to shake off the feeling of disquiet and looked about the small space. It was enough to let memory flood back into her. Her poorly thought out ploy hadn’t got her killed, but it hadn’t got her an immediate audience with Knight-Commander Meredith either. Naturally, her weapons were nowhere to be seen. At least she was in the Gallows. She supposed the Maker had no reason to make life easy for her.

Her briefings before departure had covered enough to know that the Gallows’ cells extended below sea level, yet the small space was oppressively hot and close instead of dank and cold. The only illumination was an eerie red light that only barely provided enough light for her to make out the cell’s interior. Cassandra had a creeping suspicion that she knew precisely what the source was.

She pulled herself up to the cell’s door and peered through the bars, absently rubbing at the knot of dull pain at the back of her head. They hadn’t bothered with any torches to provide light. Instead, the corridor was illuminated by thick outcroppings of scarlet crystal that burst out of the occasional cell all the way down the corridor in each direction. Delicate tendrils of lightning flickered across shards and danced in the air. Each flare brought with it a sound that seemed unpleasantly similar to the sound of snapping bones. The light emitted by the crystals throbbed gently, like she had been trapped inside the body of some vast creature. The Fade itself couldn’t have held a more nightmarish landscape. If she had had any doubts about whether she was actually in the Gallows, they were gone now. She wasn’t convinced that was as good a result as she had first thought.

With a start, Cassandra realised that her shoulder no longer burned with pain. Someone must have reset it whilst she was unconscious. She shuddered at the thought that it might have been the Knight-Captain or one of the other corrupt templars. She raised a hand to the tender spot, then rolled her shoulder to test the range of movement. It was sore, but it moved freely enough. Even so, she was grateful it hadn’t been her sword arm. The deep slash across her side was more worrying. It had been tended, but it burned as if infected. She shuddered to think how a wound inflicted by lyrium might react. If she had been a mage, it would have been lethal.

She grunted in disgust at allowing herself to be hit. Surprise was no excuse. Still, there were more immediate concerns to take her attention. Best not to waste the opportunity now that she was in the Gallows. She strained to see as best as she could through the gloom. The shadows in between each outcropping seemed unnaturally thick and deep, but at the very end of the corridor, the subdued red glow reflected off steel armour.

“Templar!” she called out. “Let me speak to your commanding officer!”

The figure shifted and stalked closer with all the restless energy the Knight-Captain had shown. The Knight-Corporal that approached seemed completely indifferent to the crystals that punched out of either shoulder like wings. Ignore that, and she looked more human than the Knight-Templar shock troops had. But like them all, her face was pale and feverish beneath her Free Marcher complexion. Despite the heat, her skin was dry, unlike the sheen of sweat on Cassandra’s brow. Prominent veins spidered up from her neck and across her cheeks, pulsing slowly in time with the glow of the crystal in the corridor.

“You will wait until Knight-Captain Cullen has time for you,” the templar ordered her brusquely. That buzzing hum of a voice that they all seemed to share was becoming unpleasantly familiar.

“I demand to speak to Knight-Captain Cullen or Knight-Commander Meredith. The Chantry will not be happy to hear that a representative of the Divine has been taken prisoner,” Cassandra retorted.

The templar laughed — a high chiming sound of genuine amusement that echoed from the crystal shards of lyrium — and looked her up and down with hungry eyes. “The Chantry has no power any more, Seeker. If they did, they would have led an Exalted March on Kirkwall two years ago.”

“It may become necessary if I am not released.”

The templar raised a dubious eyebrow. She slammed a fist against the wall by the cell door with a crystalline crunch. Cassandra flinched back reflexively.

“You will wait,” the templar ordered with a calm belying her burst of anger. “Much as it may offend you to hear this, Kirkwall has more important concerns than the Chantry’s petty insecurities.”

With a final disgusted look for Cassandra, she strode back up the corridor to be lost in the gloom again.

Cassandra sent up a brief prayer of gratitude that the templar had chosen to take out her anger on the wall. Clearly the Knight-Captain had been right that his subordinates’ hold over baser emotions was tenuous at best.

She exhaled and settled into a kneeling position on the floor. Perhaps they didn’t have the spine to execute her and she would be left to rot instead. There had been times when Circles had been investigated for ‘forgetting’ about suspected blood mage prisoners in their cells. The withered bodies were often found months or years later. She prayed she wasn’t about to face the same fate.

* * *

In preparation for her induction into the Seekers of Truth, Cassandra had spent a year in silent vigil. She might be a woman of action, but she was no stranger to long hours of meditation and contemplation. But trapped in the stifling darkness of the Gallows’ holding cells, it was a little harder to maintain her mental focus than it should have been. The non-sound that filled the air only seemed to highlight the oppressive hush of the cells, as if no one was left alive in the entire fortress. It made the clank and crystalline echoes when the inevitable patrol passed by all the more startling. Each time, she would crack open an eyelid and hope that the Knight-Captain — or better yet, Knight-Commander Meredith — had finally recalled that she was down here. Sound carried strangely down here, seeming to come either from an impossible distance as if echoing in a vast cavern or from close enough to be in the cell with her. But inevitably, the sound of booted feet would fade away without her catching sight of a single soul, corrupt or otherwise. Each time, she was never quite sure she truly had heard footsteps and not some twisted echo from the humming and snapping lyrium all around her.

After Maker knew how long, and with nothing better to do, Cassandra studied the crystal growths leaping out of cell doors. She had a stinging cut on her side to demonstrate how sharp the crystalline edges were. In theory, a smaller shard could be a useful makeshift weapon, assuming she was willing to touch it. Raw lyrium was instant death for mages and little better for non-mages, but the templars seemed to tolerate it well enough. She tore a strip of cloth from the tunic under her armour and tucked it into a pocket. Now she simply had to pray she was released before it became necessary to make and use an improvised weapon.

Her resolution to take some kind of action seemed to have been the necessary trigger to finally bring some life to her quiet corner of the cells. The heavy thud of footsteps echoed closer rather than passing off into the distance. The menacing bulk of a templar stopped in front of the door, cutting down on what little light leaked into the cell. The forest of crystal spines crowding his shoulders cast his warped features in an unnatural, ghoulish light, sharpening already gaunt features. It left his eyes as deep black wells with sparking pools of red in their depths. She snapped to her feet and returned his flat look.

“You are not Knight-Commander Meredith, but I suppose a Knight-Templar will do.”

The templar barely seemed to register the barbed comment. It was difficult to judge features past the crystal warping his face and body, but at a guess, Cassandra would say it was the same templar she had seen accompanying the Knight-Captain in Kirkwall. He studied her wordlessly. Cassandra’s skin crawled beneath the unnatural heat of his stare. There was very little humanity left in the templar’s eyes. Lyrium inevitably seared away the minds of those who used it long enough. The exact symptoms might differ, but red lyrium seemed to be no improvement in that respect.

The templar didn’t seem to find anything of note. His glower uncreased ever so slightly and he stepped away from the cell door, revealing the slighter form of the Knight-Captain behind him. Cassandra scowled at him. It might be the expected treatment for a prisoner, but she didn’t especially appreciate the implication that she was not to be trusted.

The Knight-Captain dismissed his bodyguard with a curt nod and turned to Cassandra. “I apologise for the delay,” he said mildly. She could swear he had purposefully adopted the tone to irritate her. “Kirkwall is a busy city.”

“I have no doubt,” she replied sardonically.

“I don’t believe you actually gave me your name, Seeker.”

“There is no reason why I should. But I know of _you_ , Ser Cullen Rutherford,” Cassandra said flatly. He might still be feigning politeness, but she didn’t feel especially inclined to participate. “The reports on the breaking of Kinloch Hold were required reading for all Seekers of Truth. You have fallen far from the templar who resisted demons.”

He leaned against the wall opposite her cell door and folded his arms. In the darkness of the corridor, she could see faint tendrils of light from the scarlet glow filling his eyes caressing his cheekbones.

“Are you trying to goad me, Seeker?” he replied dispassionately. “Those memories hurt no more or less than any others. Red lyrium teaches you to embrace pain or lose your mind entirely.”

Cassandra studied his posture. There was no suggestion of pain, but the flush of his face could easily have been of someone fighting off an illness, as if his body constantly battled against the red lyrium he ingested. Certainly the slash on her side burned more than it should have. “It hurts?”

“Oh it most certainly hurts, Seeker,” he replied with a sudden smirk, gaze sharpening on her. The fine lines etched into the corners of his eyes wrinkled with the smile. “Agony might be more accurate. Every nerve is alight, humming with a song I wish you could hear. Taking red lyrium hurts. Not taking it hurts far worse.” He raised his hand and clenched it into a fist. The delicate talons pierced through the leather palm of his gauntlet and a trickle of blood dripped to the floor. “I find it to be an advantage. The pain of an injury is nothing compared to the beautiful agony of that song setting fire to my blood.”

Cassandra shook her head in bafflement. “How could you willingly corrupt yourselves like this?

“You think this … this _pollution_ was willing?” he snapped, mood changing in an instant. He stepped close enough to the cell door that Cassandra could have grabbed him by the throat if she had thought it would have done any good. “Anyone can be broken with enough time. Meredith was given more than enough of that.”

Most of Cassandra was disgusted by everything these templars represented and had no interest in hearing whatever excuses he had constructed for himself. But she was a Seeker first and foremost, here to gather information. If not from the source herself, then from her second-in-command.

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “I will gladly hear your story. How did the corruption begin?”

“Allow me to turn your earlier comment back on you.” He gave her a scornful look. “I’m surprised that you or the Chantry cares. I’ve seen no evidence of it in all my years of service.”

She raised a hand to welcome his explanation and leaned against the wall by the cell door. “I am a Seeker of Truth.”

He offered a sharp smile. “Perhaps later, Seeker. I have a question of my own. What brings you to Kirkwall, two years after things went wrong?”

“Not much information leaves Kirkwall these days, but what little we have gathered has become a major concern for the Divine.” She studied him, wondering how much news they received from the outside world. As second-in-command, it was reasonable to assume he knew enough to understand. “You have heard that other Circles are in chaos following the annulment here?”

He nodded and leaned back against the wall, encouraging her to continue, glittering eyes cutting through the gloom to fix on hers.

“Unfortunately, the Chantry chose to focus on Circles that could still be recovered, rather than a city it had already lost. But no one could turn a blind eye on Kirkwall forever, especially given what little news we could gather.”

“You intend to discover whether an Exalted March is necessary?”

Cassandra found herself struggling to judge his reaction to the prospect. Despite his relative youth, he had been a senior Templar officer for near ten years. They could be hard to read at the best of times. But here, any subtler expressions she might normally rely on in an interrogation were lost behind the gleaming eyes and feverish pallor. It was hard to tell whether he was angry or simply curious.

“Whether Kirkwall needs immediate support,” she replied evasively.

“The destruction of a chantry and annulment of a Circle for the actions of a single apostate wasn’t enough reason for the Chantry to deem support necessary?” he countered irritably, brows lowering in a scowl.

“I ... cannot speak for the Chantry’s actions.” She could see his anger at the non-existent defence. She was surprised to find herself having sympathy for his reaction. Support _should_ have been sent as soon as possible, whatever refusals Meredith had made. “Originally, I was to speak with Knight-Commander Meredith to determine why she made the decisions she has over the past two years. Now, I am concerned that the blood mage threat to this city is greater than first suspected.”

“It certainly is, Seeker.” He raised a taloned hand. “This corruption is all in the name of granting us the power to fight the looming threat in Kirkwall. Or so Meredith claimed. I will grant that this red lyrium is the only thing that has allowed us the strength to continue fighting as our numbers are slowly worn down.”

“But you don’t agree with her,” she asked, probing for a reaction. It wasn’t the first time now he had implied having had disagreements with his commanding officer. Perhaps not as loyal as old reports out of Kirkwall had suggested.

He gave her a dubious look. “Are you testing my loyalty, Seeker?”

“I am gathering information, as is my duty. I imagine you understand that.”

Baleful red eyes studied her face for a long moment before finally answering. “I believe power itself became the end goal, even if it was not initially.” He overrode whatever questions that comment had triggered in her mind with one of his own. “Are reinforcements on the way to Kirkwall?”

“If necessary,” she replied flatly.

He smiled. “Meaning not yet. Given how slow the Chantry has been to react, I find it unlikely that they will arrive in good time. We will continue as we were until they do.”

She scowled at him. “They will come if necessary,” she repeated. Better not to tell him that a small force was encamped half a day outside the city. Given the number and strength of the templars she had seen in Kirkwall, they stood little chance.

“What information have you gathered regarding the blood mages in Kirkwall? As I said, a Seeker’s insight would be beneficial.”

“The fact that you could cleanse the rune suggests a connection to the Fade,” she offered. “Blood magic is the easiest way to pierce the Veil and summon demons.”

He nodded as if that were obvious. “Any competent templar could gather as much. You have nothing further?”

She shrugged. “I have been here barely a day. Allow me to speak to your Knight-Commander and I would happily exchange information.”

“In due course, Seeker,” he replied. He pushed himself off the wall and made to leave.

“Wait!” she called out, “This red lyrium of yours. Where did it come from? Not even the Seekers of Truth have heard of it.”

He seemed hesitant about whether to answer or not. Finally, he shrugged and settled himself in front of her cell door again.

“I have no idea where Meredith found it. She may have had it far longer, but she only displayed it openly three years ago. After she used its power to-” he stopped, as if he had meant to say something else, “to kill Kirkwall’s apostate Champion, it began to grow uncontrollably. It can be processed far more easily and is far more powerful than normal lyrium. A simple way to free ourselves from the Chantry’s control, as long as you can ignore the cost.” He inclined his head to the outcroppings visible in the cell opposite hers. “However, the reaction to raw red lyrium in particular is … interesting. Any non-mage can come into contact with it, but she found that those without templar training fall to its corruption quickly, even without ingesting it. They do not have the strength of will or tolerance to lyrium that allows them to resist.”

Cassandra’s eyes widened. The odd shapes and outcroppings of crystal in the opposite cell resolved themselves into arms, a head, legs. “Andraste persevere us. Those were _people_?”

“Unfortunately,” Cullen replied flatly. “Those who chose to resist her rule. Those few mages who escaped the annulment of the Circle. Weaker minded templars. Red lyrium takes them all.”

He raised his left arm and stripped the gauntlet with the shriek of metal on crystal that seemed to resonate from the lyrium around them. He flexed a hand that was slowly crystallising, solid red replacing his flesh and bone. Without the gauntlet to conceal the corruption, it looked more like a piece of a statue than something living. Yet he moved it smoothly, crystal segments sliding against each other to allow him something close to the full dexterity of a normal hand.

“For a templar, the corruption is slower, but still inevitable, regardless of how much control or willpower you bring to bear. We lost many in the early days, when we thought it could be used as normal lyrium is.” He grimaced and pulled the gauntlet back on. The talons pierced a new set of holes through the fingertips, scraping against metal and punching through leather as if it wasn’t there. “It is a fine balance.”

She folded her arms and glared at him, vaguely irritated that his scarlet eyes could glare better than she could ever manage. “This corruption cannot be the Maker’s will.”

A flicker of anger crossed his face, before smoothing itself out again. “None of us can speak for the Maker’s will. Not even _you_ , Seeker of Truth.”

He turned away, ready to leave again, before pausing and turning back, a measuring look in his gleaming eyes.

“I was loyal to Meredith for more than six years, Seeker. The first time I chose to defy her was when I refused to execute Champion Hawke. _That_ was the first time I saw the power that red lyrium had granted her. I was subdued and confined to my quarters without lyrium for a week,” he said evenly, as if he wasn’t speaking of one of the most severe punishments for a templar outside of expulsion. “The second time was only a few weeks later. I wrote a letter to the Seekers asking for their aid. I thought she was mad and needed their assistance. _Your_ assistance.”

He stepped up to the cell door, eyes glowing like a pair of coals. A taloned hand cut furrows in the cell’s bars as he gripped it. It took an effort not to step back. Flesh and bone would provide little resistance to those cruel crystalline needles.

“She found the response on my desk. That time, I was confined in these very holding cells for long enough that I lost all hold on my reason. She waited until I was too delirious to know my own name, let alone that the lyrium she gave me before my eventual release was not Chantry lyrium. By the time I realised, it was too late to go back. That I recovered at all was a miracle I’m not sure I am grateful to have been granted. And what was the Seekers’ response? ‘Prior investigations have found no cause for concern’,” he quoted with cold disgust. “So no, this was not a _choice_ , any more than any other aspect of my life. But I will accept the Maker’s will, as I always have.”

He retreated from the cell door as soon as he finished speaking, as if even being on the right side was too much to bear for any great length of time. Perhaps it was.

Cassandra winced. Now she understood what he had meant by accusing her of being late. “I doubt it means much at this point, but I am sorry. We should have done more. The Divine is attempting to make up for prior mistakes now.”

“Not good enough, Seeker,” he snapped, fist clenching by his side. A few fresh drops of blood trickled to the ground, glinting with a faint light of their own in the darkness. “The Chantry abandoned us to our fates, if it ever cared at all. I see little reason to trust them. Unless you have some defence that can convince me?”

She sighed. A Revered Mother would no doubt have been able to give a long sermon on faith in the Chantry as the Maker’s representative in the world. That was a skill that Cassandra didn’t claim to hold. She had a feeling it was too late to convince this Knight-Captain of anything. It wasn’t just in Kirkwall that those in the Templar Order whispered of how the Chantry was indifferent to their service at best and took it for granted at worst.

“That is a challenge for more eloquent speakers than me,” she replied. “All I know is that I have faith in the Maker and his Bride.”

“‘Have faith’? _That_ _’s_ your defence? I can’t say I regret our independence.” He barked out a crystalline laugh of bitter amusement and stalked away, chased by the snapping retort of lightning emitted by the shards of lyrium.

Cassandra watched him disappear back down the corridor, lost in thought. She had been sent to ascertain how an entire chapter of the Order could splinter away in the space of a week without a single desertion. The answer appeared to be the same thing that had always been used to keep templars in line. Lyrium. Yet the corruption of the Kirkwall chapter had clearly not been an entirely willing one. Not if Knight-Commander Meredith had needed to force her own second-in-command into submission.

She grunted in disgust. It couldn’t make a difference in the end. Unwilling or not, the Order in Kirkwall seemed too far gone to save.


	5. Meeting Meredith

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassandra is finally given a chance to achieve her primary goal in visiting Kirkwall

> _Those who have touched red lyrium_ _—or even come near it—report that it "sings" to them, like whispers in the mind that slowly drive them mad._
> 
> _—From a partially burned letter by an unknown writer, affixed with the Grey Warden seal._

Cassandra hadn't meant to fall asleep. Not with so much red lyrium around and a subsonic hum that hovered just at the edge of perception. Pure lyrium sang in its raw form. Evidently, so did red Iyrium. Maker knew what it could do to templars who were far more sensitive to its influence than others.

Yet the stuffy heat and dim red light had pulled at her eyes and forced her unwillingly into restless and haunted sleep. She was plagued by unsettling nightmares backdropped by a discordant melody. People from her past sprouting corruption, faces stretching in grotesque screams as crystal erupted from mouths and eyes, choking them into silence. A city of people trapped in red lyrium growths likes flies in amber, forced to watch the march of blood mages leading an army of demons.

She lurched awake with a quiet gasp to the subdued sound of an almost-human voice humming. At first, she wasn't even quite sure that she _was_ awake. The echoing buzz very nearly replicated the melody that had plagued her sleep. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, despite the heat. There was something about that unconscious tic that seemed to resonate with the subsonic hum in the corridor.

She shook herself and eased herself to her feet in time to see the Knight-Captain settling himself at the wall opposite her cell door. His bodyguard hadn’t accompanied him this time. Perhaps she was no longer considered a threat.

“Nightmares?” he asked.

“We are not friends, Knight-Captain,” she replied curtly.

He shrugged easily. “I suffered the same problem. Red lyrium has the opposite effect to blue until you acclimatise.”

She grunted in frustration and rested her arms on the bars of the cell door. “Ask your questions, or let me see Knight-Commander Meredith. I cannot believe she is indifferent to my being here.”

“Why are you in Kirkwall?”

She rolled her eyes. Perhaps he meant to catch her out in some lie. “We already discussed this.”

“I know. Why were _you_ sent, rather than some other Seeker?”

“I am Seeker Cassandra Pentaghast, Right Hand of the Divine,” she admitted cautiously. “She knows I care about the truth, not politics or power. We have failed Kirkwall by leaving the problem to fester for so long.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Quite the lofty title you have, Seeker. I wouldn’t have thought we merited a visit from a Hand of the Divine. You want to speak to Meredith?” He slipped a key into the cell door’s lock and tugged it open. “Fine. This way.”

Cassandra blinked at him, nonplussed. He had dodged the request for long enough that she hadn’t actually expected to be granted an audience.

She left her cell to find that the Knight-Captain hadn’t been quite as alone as he seemed. A Knight-Lieutenant stood at ease just out of view of the cell. He was almost but not quite human in appearance, much like his commanding officer. The Knight-Lieutenant made no effort to conceal the disdainful curl of his lip as he gave her a measuring look and pointedly failed to draw himself to attention. She matched his glare with a short one of her own and ignored the Knights-Templar who fell into step behind them. These were the same men who had acted as the Knight-Captain’s bodyguard in Kirkwall. It was the senior officers who should concern her. The rank and file followed their lead.

The Knight-Captain led her out of the quiet cells through dim corridors filled with the dry heat and scarlet gleam emitted by occasional outcroppings of red lyrium. There didn’t seem to be be much to differentiate the oppressive corridors from the holding cells, aside from the increased signs of life. Even in inhabited portions of the fortress, they seemed to be almost entirely reliant on the crystals for illumination. Yet despite how discomfiting the crystalline outcroppings made the fortress, Cassandra was forced to grudgingly admit that it was well maintained once she looked past the nightmarish first impression. Discipline was kept as well here as any loyal chapter of the Templar Order. Those they passed saluted and gave way to the Knight-Captain as if they were simply normal templars in a garrison or Circle. It was a jarring contrast.

Many of the officers they passed could have passed as normal humans, as if they had or were allowed the control over their lyrium intake to limit the changes it triggered. But every last templar bore some indicator of corruption, from nothing more than pallid or feverish skin all the way to crystal that ought to have immobilised them. They might have retained deference for their superior officers, but glittering eyes watched her pass with expressions ranging from apathetic to disgusted. Seekers were used to feeling unwelcome around templars, but never was that dislike made so glaringly obvious. This felt dangerous.

Cassandra gave the larger protrusions of lyrium they passed a cautious margin of distance. With templars trailing her, now was certainly not the time to try and take a shard, be it as a makeshift weapon or simply a sample for further investigation. Unless it was absolutely necessary, she would rather not find out what influence it had over Seekers.

They emerged from the dim corridors into an internal courtyard, past the hungry eyes of corrupted templars that glowed in the night-time darkness. She looked over her shoulder to catch a glimpse of the Gallows and shuddered. The vast bulk of the what had once been the Circle towered into the night as a menacing confusion of black shadow and jagged glowing crystal. Despite knowing that it was a perfectly vertical structure, she found herself hunching her shoulders as though it was leaning threateningly over them all. What little was visible of the midnight sky was hardly more comforting. Ragged streamers of mist reduced the view to thin strips of black strewn with the cold and distant pinpricks of stars.

She was glad their route took them back inside, into a corridor lined with a few doors. Unlike the rest of the Gallows, warm and comfortingly normal torchlight provided illumination, rather than the unnatural pulsating glow of red lyrium.

The Knight-Captain stopped in front of a simple door, the silent presence of the others left at the corridor’s entrance.

 “After you, Seeker Pentaghast,” he offered with an amused smile.

Cassandra’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. This felt far too much like a trap, but speaking with Meredith was her primary goal in coming to Kirkwall. What choice did she have? She pushed the door open confidently, then froze before she could take a step into the room.

It was clearly an office. A desk was stacked with organised piles of reports. A quill still lay on top of a half-written missive. There was even a shelf full of neatly arranged books against one wall.

Knight-Commander Meredith sat behind the desk, solid crystalline eyes fixed on the door. A thicket of delicate red spines poked up at irregular angles through tangled blonde hair, as if each strand was slowly crystallising. Thicker shards poked out of her shoulders, entirely overwhelming her pauldrons. In places, they had merged with the back of her chair until it was hard to say where she ended and the seat began. The hands resting on the chair’s arms were likewise almost merging with a bed of crystals that leapt through flesh and metal and wood as easily as air. Growths trailed out from the seated figure to stretch across the floor, climbing up the wall beside Cassandra.

“Andraste preserve me,” she gasped, too surprised to shy away from the crystal spines humming at head height beside her. “This is Knight-Commander Meredith? But she is-”

“Dead?” the Knight-Captain offered. “Yes. I killed her.” He curled his fingers around the hilt of his sword, a vague frown tugging at his lips.

Cassandra blinked, stunned into disbelief. _This_ was the shadowy presence that hung over all of Kirkwall? The horror story that had sent her to the city? With an incredulous sidelong glance over to the Knight-Captain, she took a step closer to inspect the half-corpse, half-statue that had once been Knight-Commander Meredith. Light pulsed gently from the crystal and the delicate tracery of veins beneath her exposed skin, preserving her remains and granting her an obscene semblance of life. But almost lost in the scarlet glow of crystal, a thick crust of dried blood stained her neck. Judging by the anger twisting her face, she had seen her death coming.

“I cannot believe it,” she murmured. “How could we not have heard of this?”

“Something had to be done,” the Knight-Captain said evenly. “I am guilty of many failures and many crimes, but I lose no sleep over this one. Duty is all that matters.” He said the words as if they were a familiar mantra.

“You assassinated your own Knight-Commander,” Cassandra stated flatly as she looked back at the Knight-Captain. “The Viscountess of Kirkwall. A coup _and_ a mutiny.”

“I had no choice,” he accused her. “I tried exercising my right as Knight-Captain to relieve her of her position once before. There was no chance she would have been any more willing to accept it a second time, let alone allow me to depose her as Viscountess. Believe me, the situation in Kirkwall would have been far worse if she still lived.”

“Do your subordinates know you killed her?” Cassandra asked. It was a faint hope, but perhaps there was a way to sow some chaos in this renegade splinter of the Order and bring it crashing down.

“The senior officers know the full tale,” he replied, with a smirk that said he had guessed what she was thinking. “The rest saw her as the lash keeping them in line. It was her doing that we were corrupted. Those who might have protested were dealt with.”

“How long ago did you kill her?”

“Five months ago,” he replied, without a hint of shame or regret.

Five months without any sign of infighting. The templars they had passed had been nothing but respectful. The city was still held the Templars’ steel grip. They certainly didn’t seem to care that their Knight-Commander had been murdered.

“So you are the one in command here?”

“Indeed I am.”

Cassandra shook her head. Did this change things? Likely not. Whoever was in command in Kirkwall, matters were far more complex than anyone had anticipated.

“Kirkwall is mad,” she muttered with a disbelieving shake of her head. “ _You_ are mad.”

He gave her a look as though she had just told him the sky was blue and water was wet. “You sound surprised, Seeker Pentaghast. You cannot ingest or even live in such close proximity to such a quantity of red lyrium for so long and retain your sanity.” He offered an empty smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “But I’ve had many years of practice in feigning it.”

Cassandra grimaced. It had clearly been a terrible choice to have this templar sent to Kirkwall after Kinloch Hold. If Knight-Commander Greagoir had still been alive, he would been called before the Divine to answer for his poor judgement.

The Knight-Captain seemed to return to reality. His gaze sharpened and he gestured back towards the door. “We’re done here. This way.”

Cassandra held her ground. “Are you not concerned that I will spread the news of Knight-Commander Meredith’s death?”

He let out a brief amused breath. “Who are you going to tell, Seeker?”

Cassandra suddenly became painfully aware that the Knight-Captain still had a hand clasped casually about the hilt of his sword. She was a Seeker of Truth in the stronghold of a rebel splinter of the Order under the command of a mutinous Knight-Captain. She didn’t have a weapon and she was trapped on an island full of people who were most decidedly not her allies. They could have no possible reason to let her live. The glittering ember eyes that held hers certainly didn’t seem to contain much sympathy. She might still be confident that she could take him in single combat if she could find a sword, but the templars waiting in the corridor? And then the others stationed in the Gallows? The lowered portcullis in the courtyard sealed the only exit she had seen. She was trapped far worse than she had been in that Lowtown hovel.

“Knight-Captain?” called a deferential voice from the corridor.

Cassandra very nearly sighed in relief as the Knight-Captain’s attention was drawn away by the buzzing voice of the Knight-Lieutenant. He stepped outside and acknowledged the salute of his subordinate with a curt nod.

With his focus elsewhere, she drifted towards the nearby outcropping of crystal climbing up the door frame. She grabbed a loose shard with her prepared strip of torn cloth and gingerly wrapped it before tucking the makeshift weapon away. It wouldn’t be wise to make an attempt at an escape now, but an opportunity might present itself.

A quick glance showed that she hadn’t been noticed. The small piece bled heat through its thin wrappings and triggered an itching beneath her skin. She offered a brief prayer that she was not dooming herself to follow in the templars’ corruption.

“I’ve just been told that a blood mage incursion was repelled at checkpoint sixteen, Ser,” the Knight-Lieutenant reported crisply, voice warped by the buzz of his corruption.

“Casualties?”

“All templars manning the post were lost, but the blood mages were neutralised once reinforcements arrived.”

“Maker. Too many losses. And the attacks are coming more often,” the Knight-Captain sighed. “I want a full squad at each guard post from now on.”

“As ordered, Ser.” There was a moments pause and the Knight-Lieutenant’s brow creased as he scowled. “This increase in incursions is not a good sign.”

“No it is not,” the Knight-Captain replied flatly.

“But there is some good news, Ser,” the Knight-Lieutenant informed him.  The man’s sudden sharp smile did not bode well. “Knight-Corporal Odessin has just arrived back from Kirkwall with three suspected apostates for interrogation.”

“The Maker must be feeling generous.” The Knight-Captain flicked a look over his shoulder at Cassandra and thought for a moment.

“Do not let me stop you,” she said neutrally. It would be informative to see how suspected apostates were treated. And of course, a better way to keep attention away from her.

Cassandra had to restrain an amused smile. The black look of irritation he gave her in response said he did not appreciate the implication that he was required to defer to her.

“I’ll handle it now,” he said as he turned back to his subordinate.

The portcullis sealing off the internal courtyard rumbled open as they re-entered. A small column of templars marched through, a hunched and stumbling trio of figures enclosed within the twinned ranks. The deep humming throb of a Templar denial of magic was an unpleasant pressure on Cassandra’s inner ear. The templars were the mix of almost-normal and corrupted figures to which she was growing unpleasantly accustomed. But their captives were a more curious group. A trio of humans, well enough dressed to have come from Hightown. Little wonder the templars had considered them suspect. Battered and bruised, they did not seem to have been treated especially kindly by their captors. But despite the signs of harsh treatment, there were no obvious open wounds. Whatever they might have done, the templars took no chances at providing a possible blood mage with a ready source of power.

“Keep her out of the way, Ser Brinn,” the Knight-Captain snapped as he stalked towards the small column.

Cassandra offered a scowl in response to a mocking grin that did little to hide the simmering anger in the templar’s eyes. Of course it would be the same one who had dislocated her arm. Small chance he had been accidentally chosen to keep her back.

“Ser Brinn. A pleasure.”

“So glad your arm is better, Seeker,” he replied insincerely as he detached himself from the Knight-Captain’s escort to approach Cassandra.

She didn’t allow herself to be restrained this time, deftly avoiding him to stand out of the way. He shrugged and stationed himself beside her as Cassandra leaned against a wall.

“Don’t think the Knight-Captain will stop me if you try anything this time, Seeker,” came his low crystalline murmur. “Stay put.”

“Give me a sword and I would gladly offer you a rematch, Knight-Templar,” she replied curtly. Her eyes narrowed on the proceedings as she ignored the templar’s amused chuckle.

The column drew to a halt in the centre of the courtyard. Each captive was brought forwards and forced onto their knees beneath the impassive regard of the Knight-Captain and Knight-Lieutenant. Aside for a few pained grunts, they didn’t make a sound. Either they had given up on protesting, or they didn’t realise quite how dangerous a situation they were in.

“We caught these three trying to break into one of the warehouses on the docks, Knight-Captain, Knight-Lieutenant,” the column’s Knight-Corporal reported.

“Which one?” the Knight-Captain asked curtly.

“The abandoned Jacosta & Sons warehouse, Ser.”

The Knight-Captain’s expression became even grimmer, if that were possible, and there was a grunt of irritation from the Knight-Lieutenant.

“That makes the third time in as many weeks.” He focused a glacial look on the kneeling figures. “We thoroughly searched that warehouse. There’s nothing there. Quite convenient that you would attempt to break in with our attentions focused on an incursion elsewhere.” Their matched attempts at conciliatory expressions withered as his hand settled on the hilt of his sword. “Any theories, Ser Rost?”

“That sounds rather like the actions of the blood mages we’ve been neutralising,” the Knight-Lieutenant replied with equally exaggerated thoughtfulness.

The Knight-Captain’s smile down at the nervous trio was vicious. “So it does. Explain why you were trying to enter the warehouse, and you might delay your execution long enough to plead for the Maker’s forgiveness.”

“Andraste be my witness, Ser Templar,” one of the men protested desperately. “None of us are mages. You have to believe us.”

His companions nodded in enthusiastic agreement. The woman’s vocal protests joined the first man’s, but the second seemed to have been made mute under the hostile attention of so many templars.

The protests fell on deaf ears. At a nod from the Knight-Captain, swords were drawn by the Knights-Templar behind each captive. Their matched gasps were cut short as cold steel rested against their throats.

A warning glare from Ser Brinn forced her to reconsider voicing a protest quite yet. She resolved herself to watch and pray they went no further than threats. A large part of her knew that was a distant hope. No Chantry authority would blink an eye at the execution of proven maleficarum if it was deemed necessary. But she was under the distinct impression that even suspected maleficarum received the same treatment in Kirkwall. Perhaps even simple apostates. No one knew what happened to those that emerged in Kirkwall.

“Lie again,” the Knight-Captain snapped, “and you will join the other enemies of Kirkwall rotting at the bottom of the bay.”

“We’re innocent of whatever it is you think we’ve done,” the woman protested.

Even Cassandra was feeling less than convinced. With the very real threat of death, they should have been desperate. Instead, they were allowing a single person to speak for them.

“Innocent?” the Knight-Captain responded incredulously. “I find that unlikely. Every Hightown resident is a blood mage collaborator. Trespassing only damns you further.” He drew his sword. “Execution it is.”

The taste of decay and copper filled the air. Cassandra’s eyes widened as the woman and one of the men abruptly reached up in unison to grip the swords at their throats. Impossibly, there wasn’t a single sound of pain as bare skin was sliced open by razor sharp steel. Glistening tendrils of blood whipped at the air, shoving the nearby templars away.  The two captives slumped to the floor in total silence, blank eyes staring as their blood swept up and encased the silent man in an intricate web. His own blood joined the masking shield, streaming from a cut drawn across his neck as the templar behind him had been pushed away. Despite closer targets, ribbons of blood darted towards the Knight-Captain in one writhing mass. He was grabbed by his sword hand. Another curled around his breastplate and squeezed. Others snaked up towards the exposed skin of his face.

Cassandra’s hand darted to her hip and hissed in anger as she found her sword still missing. Templars were already moving. There was a carmine flash of light and deafening crack, as if a thunderstorm had broken out directly overheard. The blood mage was tossed backwards and bounced heavily off the wall behind him. The snap of bone was almost as loud as the cracking retort of the templar smite. A bark of surprise was cut short and the bloody ribbons splashed to the ground, painting the flagstones deep red and coating the Knight-Captain’s amour in gore where they had touched. When the blood mage came to rest on the floor, he had very obviously broken multiple bones. He would be dead within hours if he didn’t receive immediate healing.

The crushing force exerted on the Knight-Captain had to have caused damage, but he didn’t show any signs beyond a wince. He grabbed the dazed figure by the throat. The man’s toes barely scraped the ground as he was hauled up to the Knight-Captain’s eye level.

“I’ve lost count of the number of times you maleficarum have tried to kill me. What do you hope to gain? What are you doing in Kirkwall?” he demanded.

The man bared his teeth in a blood-stained smile and spat at the Knight-Captain. “You couldn’t do anything about it even if you knew,” he choked out.

The Knight-Captain didn’t even blink as the bloody wad slid down his cheek. If it held a spell of some kind, it didn’t have much effect. His grip tightened about the blood mage’s throat and he hefted the man a little higher.

“Answer me, maleficar,” he hissed, disgust dripping from his words.

For a moment, Cassandra couldn't understand the reason for the sudden keening whine that escaped the captive as he futilely scrabbled at the hand about his throat. The other onlookers didn’t seem to care or even notice, but Cassandra’s eyes widened in sudden realisation. Raw lyrium. It inevitably led to a painful death for a mage. The Knight-Captain’s lyrium-tipped fingers were digging into the unprotected skin of the mage’s neck. Execution of a blood mage was not forbidden under Chantry law, but this was torture. She couldn’t stand and watch.

“Stop this immediately, Knight-Captain Cullen,” she ordered. There was an angry hiss from beside Cassandra and heads snapped to stare at her. Two dozen pairs of dangerous scarlet eyes glared. “By all means interrogate this maleficar, but I will not abide torture.”

“You will not _abide_ it?” The disbelieving comment bounced off the high walls and drew chiming echoes from the red lyrium ringing the courtyard that drilled into Cassandra’s ears. The mage’s agonised whine cut off entirely as the Knight-Captain’s fingers clenched convulsively. “I answer to the Maker, not you, Seeker of Truth!”

His sword hand came up. He spitted the blood mage through the heart and let the lifeless body crumple to the floor, stepping through the spreading pool of blood to stalk closer to her. Whether it was the bloody sword in his hand, or the razored focus in his eyes that said he held a smite ready, Cassandra was suddenly nauseatingly convinced she was staring her own death in the face. Her fingers drifted towards the wrapped shard in her pocket. Now, before it was too late. The portcullis was still open.

“You have outstayed your welcome, Seeker,” he snapped.

This time, she couldn’t avoid the forceful shove from Ser Brinn that pushed her towards the open portcullis. Her fingers curled around the wrapped shard in her pocket as she allowed herself to be forced through the gateway. It was to her advantage to gain the distance.

She focused on what she had memorised of the Gallows’ layout. Here, the gateway out of Templar Hall. Straight onwards through the side courtyard to the secondary entryway leading down to the docks. Then the docks themselves. Maker send the gates were unsealed and there was some craft she could use.

She allowed herself to stumble after a particularly hard push, then kept going out of Ser Brinn’s reach, breaking into a sprint. Pounding footsteps broke out behind her. Heavy armour would slow them. That was her sole advantage.

She bit back a curse as she found the first side gate sealed and darted down a passage. There were others. Or the main gate.

Honed senses told her a templar was right on her heels. She snapped around, wrapped crystal shard darting up to strike at the exposed neck or face. She had expected Ser Brinn, but it was the Knight-Captain himself who snapped an arm up to block the blow. The shard of crystal scraped a shallow cut across his cheek and skittered across his pauldrons as he caught her hand. The templars trailing behind moved to circle them, Ser Brinn and his glittering crystal spines at their head, but the Knight-Captain waved them away.

“You think I didn’t notice?” he laughed with mocking disbelief. His breath smelled of hot metal. With his body inches away from hers, she could feel the fiery heat raging inside. It was as if his skin only barely contained what grew freely from the other templars’ bodies. “Red lyrium calls to us. I can hear it singing to me now.” He twisted her wrist until she had no choice but to drop the shard. He kicked it away to join a larger outcropping of crystal sprouting from a wall. “I wouldn’t recommend willingly giving yourself to its corruption.”

She growled and snapped a knee up towards his groin, but he caught the blow with his free hand and tugged until the only thing keeping her standing was his grip. Needle talons pierced through her leathers into the skin beneath. If it hadn’t been for that, she could have freed herself, grabbed the sword sheathed at his hip. But with those sharp points of pain embedded beneath her skin, pulling or falling away would have ripped bloody furrows in her leg.

“Stop,” he snapped. “If I meant to kill you, I would have left you to become a host to red lyrium in the cells.” He released her and stepped back. Small droplets of her blood made darker red beads on the end of crystalline talons. “You are a Seeker of Truth who appears to actually care about their calling. Find the truth and have the Divine invoke an Exalted March on Kirkwall,” he ordered.

“I- what?” she blurted out, angry accusations dying away. All thoughts of grabbing his sword while he was distracted disappeared.

“You heard me perfectly well, Seeker.”

“I should not complain, but why in the Maker’s name would you want that?” Cassandra demanded.

“We have done our best, but the situation with the blood mages in Kirkwall is worsening,” he replied. “Even with red lyrium, this is beyond our ability to combat alone.”

She held her tongue on saying that red lyrium could well be part of the problem. Corruption could not be fought with more corruption.

“An Exalted March will have no choice but to bring you down too,” she warned him.

He shrugged. “I wish you luck.” Not a one of the templars behind him looked even vaguely troubled by the idea. They were mad. All of them. The Knight-Captain called forward the Knight-Lieutenant. “Knight-Lieutenant Rost will see you past the cordons and safely into Lowtown.”

The Knight-Lieutenant extended a gauntleted hand towards the side gate as it rumbled open. “I wouldn’t keep the ferry or the Knight-Captain waiting, Seeker,” he said with a languid smile. “You’ve already come perilously close to getting yourself killed. Unless perhaps you would prefer to enjoy the Gallows’ hospitality permanently?”

Cassandra tentatively eased herself out of a ready position. None of the templars had drawn weapons. They certainly could attack at a moment’s notice, but there was no suggestion that this was a trick. Just how desperate was the situation in Kirkwall that they would let her go free? A minor miracle would be required for the Knight-Captain to escape with anything less than execution in response to his staggering list of crimes. It had to be towering arrogance or true desperation that he would expect her help. And yet she hardly intended to turn the gift down.

“So be it, Knight-Captain,” she said reluctantly. “Can you guarantee that you and the men under your command will not interfere with my investigations?”

“Provided you restrict yourself to investigating the blood mages,” he replied curtly. “The Order in Kirkwall does not answer to you or the Chantry.”

Cassandra grunted. She would just have to be discreet with any further investigation of the Order. “I will see what can be done.”

With a careful backwards glance, Cassandra descended the steps down to the docks and walked up the gangplank onto the ferry. The ferryman — an uncorrupted human — offered her a wide-eyed look and an anxious smile. She wondered how often he saw people other than templars leave. Maker knew what someone serving the Gallows regularly would have seen. That he still lived was impressive in its own right.

As soon as the Knight-Lieutenant joined her, the ferryman pulled up the gangplank and began to sail towards open water, clearly as eager as she was to leave the Gallows behind.

When the ferry had moved far enough from the jetty to prevent her from leaping off, the Knight-Captain tossed her sword onto the deck with unnatural strength. It landed with a clatter just short of her feet. A sheaf of paper had been tied to the scabbard.

“Maker guide you, Seeker,” he called up. “I pray you can find whatever is driving the blood mages in Kirkwall.”

Cassandra couldn’t stop a shiver as the Gallows grew more distant. The inhuman eyes of the templars on the Gallows’ docks watched her, gleaming like cats’ eyes until the glow faded into insignificance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know there’s almost no readership for a story like this, but it's too much fun to give up on it now.


	6. Regroup

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassandra regroups with Varric and Merrill

 

> _The mages of Kirkwall have a more troubled history than those in other Circles. A greater percentage of them do not survive the Harrowing, and a greater percentage turn to blood magic_ _—almost double that of Starkhaven or Ostwick. Is there a secret fraternity delving into the Tevinter secrets of this city?_
> 
> _—Hidden under a cobblestone with curious markings and signed, "The Band of Three"_

 

The Kirkwall docks at night was a far different scene to the docks during the day. The hostile attention of far too many crystal infested templars fixed on Cassandra as she hopped off the ferry onto the Order’s private wharf. The only illumination came from distant torches on the public docks, but the light wasn’t necessary to pick out their glowing forms. And at this time of night, there wasn’t a single normal citizen to be seen aside. With the threatening presence of the fortress illuminated in sullen red across the bay and the corrupted templars all around, the gloomy scene bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the dreams that had wormed their way into her sleep.

If the Order decided they didn’t need her help after all, she stood little more chance in the heavily guarded docks district than she had in the Gallows, even now that she had her sword. But true to the Knight-Captain’s word, his Knight-Lieutenant led Cassandra directly through the inner cordon around the docks without any sign of being diverted. Cassandra’s attempt to extract information out of the Knight-Lieutenant was rebuffed with an amused laugh that made his contempt for her quite clear. She passed the rest of the walk attempting to guess templar numbers based on her observations of patrols. Too many for comfort, and yet also less than expected. Once, Kirkwall would have rivalled the Order’s headquarters in the White Spire for sheer force of numbers. After the annulment and two long years in a city plagued by blood mages, their numbers must have been plummeting.

It was a relief when sightlines to the Gallows were blocked by the confusion of buildings that indicated they were entering Lowtown. But at the outer cordon leading into the city proper, the templars standing watch stepped up to block her path at a curt order from the Knight-Lieutenant. It was the only time he had spoken since leaving the Gallows. Cassandra snapped about and scowled at him.

“What is the meaning of this?” she demanded.

He raised a hand to indicate the midnight skies above them. “It’s past curfew, Seeker.” Half a squad fell into place behind him. None of them showed any obvious signs of corruption beyond eyes that glittered from behind the slits of their full helms, but it wasn’t especially reassuring. It simply meant they would pass without comment in Lowtown. “I’m afraid you can’t wander the city unaccompanied. An escort is required.”

“That will not be necessary,” she responded, concern pooling in her gut. It had been too much to hope that they would just let her leave without attempting some kind of watch on her. But if they traced her to Varric, and Varric to Merrill, there was very little chance that this tenuous trust would remain intact.

“It really is necessary, Seeker.” He folded his arms and offered her a mocking smile. “There is the very real risk that you might be taken as a suspected blood mage if you are found on the streets at night.”

“Or perhaps your Knight-Captain simply wishes to keep an eye on me,” she retorted. “I requested that none of you interfere in my investigation.”

He shrugged. If he was attempting an innocent look, it fell rather flat given the corpse-like cast of his features. “I’ve simply been ordered to provide an escort to your lodgings, Seeker.”

Cassandra grunted in irritation. “So be it. Take me to the closest reputable inn.”

“Only fair, I suppose. Keep your secrets then, Seeker,” he replied with a short laugh. The discordant buzz that played behind his voice made it an unpleasantly grating sound.

He led them out through the final cordon onto quiet streets. After the oppressive closeness of the Gallows, the high buildings and narrow lanes of Kirkwall almost seemed spacious. It was far too dark to read the name of the inn they stopped in front of, but Cassandra had no doubt that it was one with close ties to the Order.

The Knight-Lieutenant pushed open the door without any ceremony and strode into a dimly lit common room. Unlike the Hanged Man, there was no one to be seen at the tables scattered about the room. Too wary of being caught breaking curfew this close to the dock cordons, perhaps.

The innkeeper blanched an unnaturally pale shade as Cassandra and the Knight-Lieutenant entered. The rag he had been using to clean a countertop slipped from his fingers as he hurriedly turned to face them fully.

“Messere Knight-Lieutenant. Ah. What a pleasant surprise.” He visibly gulped and hunched into himself. “We haven’t had any apostates here in months,” he insisted weakly, hands obsessively smoothing his apron. He glanced Cassandra’s way briefly and dismissed her almost immediately to focus back on the armoured figure by her side. “I swear on Andraste’s pyre.”

The Knight-Lieutenant stalked up to the cringing innkeeper. “I certainly hope so. Kindly provide this woman with a room.”

“That will be quite enough, Knight-Lieutenant,” Cassandra barked. She was glad to see the man’s spine stiffen instinctively. Thank the Maker for the engrained instincts that could have even a senior officer respond to commands. “Inform Knight-Captain Cullen that no further assistance is required.”

The innkeeper visible slumped in relief as the Knight-Lieutenant turned away from him. He acknowledged her comment with a baleful glare. “You are here at the Order’s sufferance,” he snapped.

“You have a problem in this city,” she retorted. “I would advise you not to interfere any further if you want it handled properly.”

The Knight-Lieutenant’s scowl deepened and a fist clenched by his side. As if Cassandra needed any further reminder that a templar’s emotional responses were far different on red lyrium than chantry lyrium. He swept out of the inn’s common room without a further word, back perfectly straight.

It was a few moments after the inn’s door had slammed shut before the innkeeper unfolded himself from behind the counter. He seemed unsure how to treat her. There could hardly be many in the city who could successful order a templar about without being a member of the Order themselves. Yet her attire marked her as a mercenary at best. Certainly not someone who had the authority to argue with a Knight-Lieutenant.

“A room, Messere?” he offered warily. “Free of charge for a ward of the Templar Order.”

“I am nothing of the sort,” Cassandra snapped. She raised a placatory hand and extracted her coinpurse as the innkeeper flinched back. She tossed a scatter of coins on the counter that would have paid for an entire week at a far better inn. “Any room will do.”

The room he led her to was tolerable. That was the best that could be said for it. Based on her limited experience of Lowtown, its establishments left much to be desired. But she had stayed in far more uncomfortable accommodation on assignments for the Seekers. All she needed was the lantern left on the small bedside table. Barely sparing a moment to thank the innkeeper, she locked the door and strode over to the narrow window overlooking the street. There was no sign of anyone watching the entrance, but it would be naïve of her to believe that no one had been left behind. Long-serving templars could become insufferably paranoid, especially those who served in Circles. Templars in the Gallows certainly displayed those familiar signs. At the very least, the innkeeper would almost certainly report on her movements.

There was nothing to be done now until curfew was raised. With a deep sigh, Cassandra settled herself on the lumpy mattress. It was a relief to hear nothing but silence, rather than the oppressive hum that had filled the Gallows. A wide yawn nearly cracked her jaw. The peaceful quiet certainly tempted her to attempt some actual sleep, rather than the uneasy rest she had fallen into in the cell. But the itching wound on her side reminded her that there was far too much work to be done. She could rest when she left Kirkwall.

Cassandra settled her sword on her lap and inspected the sheaf of paper that the Knight-Captain had left for her. Highly unlikely that he was providing her with the two years’ worth of missing updates from the Kirkwall chapter. It had to be the asked for information on the blood mages in the city. She untied the sheaf and held the pages up to the flickering lantern light.

“Merciful Maker,” she murmured when she finished reading the loose sheets. “I should have brought more men.”

* * *

Dawn took far too long to break. Cassandra didn’t even bother trying to rest. After what she had read, sleep completely eluded her. As soon as the bells marking the end of curfew filtered through to her, she belted her sword back on and stalked down into the inn’s common room.

“Leaving so soon, Messere?” the innkeeper called out hesitantly.

“I have business,” Cassandra replied curtly. “Feel free to inform the Order that I intend to do precisely what was requested of me.”

She stopped just outside the inn’s threshold and rolled her eyes. Her brief enjoyment of the bright and gratifyingly natural Kirkwall morning faded into exasperation. The templar at the end of the street wasn’t even bothering to hide that fact that he was watching her. He offered a salute as their eyes met. It shouldn’t have been possible for salutes to be sarcastic, but his certainly was. She toyed briefly with the idea of ordering him to leave, before deciding it would only be a waste of breath. The Knight-Captain had an irritatingly loose definition of avoiding interference. Thankfully, a man in plate armour and vibrant robes was hardly a subtle tail. Now all she had to do was work out how in the Maker’s name to get to the alienage or the Hanged Man in this impossible city.

In the end, it took more time to lose her tail than it did to find the alienage. Every time she looked over her shoulder, there he was, bright robes whipping about his legs and steel armour glittering as he strode down the streets. His confident walk was a marked contrast to the worn citizens filling the streets. At best, he seemed indifferent to the people who moved to one side for him. At worst, he expected their deferential respect. For all she knew, it was a different templar every time she looked, but that aloof arrogance was the same.

She doubled back once she reached familiar streets, winding her way through busy thoroughfares in an attempt to shake him. It was only once she stumbled onto a busy market square that she was finally able to lose him in the press of people. Even then, she worried that any one of the templars patrolling or standing watch at intersections might pass on word of her location.

After a few too many dead ends, she had to admit a grudging respect for Varric’s ability to not only lead her through the city, but do so whilst avoiding templar patrols. Without the soaring canopy of the vhenadahl as a landmark to direct her, it would have been impossible to find her way back.

When she finally arrived in the heart of the alienage, she spent a tense few minutes watching for another tail. The elven inhabitants eyed her warily and gave her a wide berth as she stood in the tree’s shade. The gentle rustle of leaves went some way to easing the knot of tension between her shoulders, but it was still a long wait before she was truly comfortable. Finally, when she was certain that she had lost her watcher, she turned on her heel and strode up to the crude wooden door of Merrill’s home. One hand curled around the hilt of her sword as she raised the other to knock on the door. Merrill might be an ally, but she could never put any trust in a blood mage. Certainly not in Kirkwall. Not after what she had read.

The door creaked open moments after she had knocked. Merrill peered cautiously around the edge. Her face brightened with delight as she spotted Cassandra.

“Oh! Seeker Pentaghast,” she exclaimed. “You’re not dead.” She pulled the door open fully and gestured Cassandra inside. “Varric! Look who it is.”

Cassandra couldn’t help but sigh with relief as Merrill closed the door behind her. It was a strange time when a blood mage’s home felt like safety. At least here, the only threat was the easily watched one of an admitted blood mage.

“Seeker!” Varric called out from where he was sat at the table. “I can honestly say that I’m surprised to see you.”

Cassandra’s relief morphed into a renewed burst of irritation as she spotted the man seated at the table beside Varric.

“Captain Fabian, I told you to wait outside Kirkwall with your men,” Cassandra reprimanded him.

Fabian took his feet off the table and stood to offer a casual salute. “You did, Seeker Pentaghast. Maker knows how he managed to find us, but Serah Tethras got a message to me.”

“He’s not all that bad for someone from Ansburg,” Varric commented dryly.

Fabian gave him a sidelong glance. “Likewise, Kirkwaller.”

Cassandra turned her frown on Varric. “I do not appreciate you taking liberties with my men, Varric.”

“You’ve been gone for three days, Seeker Pentaghast,” Merrill said worriedly as she settled herself back at the table.

“In Kirkwall,” Varric added, “that means I’d have expected you to be at the bottom of the bay.”

Cassandra dropped into the seat opposite Varric. She didn’t even care that it put her right next to a blood mage. “Three days?”

She would have guessed two days, at most. How long had she been unconscious in that cell? She suppressed the sudden cold shiver that ran down her spine. The Knight-Captain had claimed he could have left her to rot in the cells. Perhaps that had been his intention from the start. The fact that he had changed his mind only reinforced her suspicion that the Order was desperate.

Varric shook his head mournfully. “I told you, Seeker. Red lyrium messes with your mind.” He became suddenly hesitant. “You’re not feeling … crazy, are you?”

“Maker, please tell me you feel fine, Seeker Pentaghast,” Fabian muttered into the suddenly strained silence. “This mission isn’t something I’m trained to handle.”

Cassandra’s hand drifted to the aching slash on her side. She hadn’t noticed any ‘craziness’ as Varric had put it, but it surely wasn’t normal to underestimate the passage of time that badly.

“I am fine,” she replied firmly. She hoped she sounded more certain than she felt.

“Well warn us if you start feeling all possessive,” Varric said darkly. “I could do with a good head start before you start waving that sword around.”

“She’s been around red lyrium for three days, Varric,” Merrill pointed out. “Maybe she’s lucky.”

Cassandra sent up a brief prayer that she was right, before shaking off the concern. “Enough worrying about me. There are other problems. I will admit, I did not give your reports enough credit, Varric. But they are not quite as accurate as you claimed.” She rested her elbows on the table and kneaded her forehead with a weary sigh. Clearly she had gone longer without proper rest than she had thought. “Knight-Commander Meredith is dead. She has been for five months.”

Varric’s eyes widened. “You can’t be serious?”

Fabian’s reaction was more muted, if no less surprised. “Well,” he said slowly, rubbing his chin. “That changes things. I think.”

“How did she die? Was it an accident? Lyrium? It can’t have been a blood mage or they’d have cracked down.” Varric leaned towards Cassandra as he launched his barrage of questions. “So why didn’t we hear anything about it? That’s not the kind of secret that it’s easy to keep.”

“Her second-in-command killed her,” Cassandra informed them all flatly, cutting off Varric as he paused to take a breath. She looked over at Fabian briefly. “Unfortunately it changes nothing for us. He seems quite content to continue on the same path as his Knight-Commander.”

Fabian released a resigned sigh. “Just once, it would be nice for a problem to solve itself without us.”

Varric sat a moment in stunned silence. “Let’s just clarify something here,” he said finally. “We’re talking about Knight-Captain Cullen, right?” he demanded. “Serious guy. Means well, but loves the rules. Templar to the bone. Tries to pretend he doesn’t have curls. He _killed_ Meredith?”

“It doesn’t seem like him,” Merrill added doubtfully.

“I saw the evidence myself. It would seem that the situation in the Gallows is far more complex than I first thought.”

“That’s an understatement,” Varric muttered.

“Fortunately for us, it would appear that Knight-Captain Cullen is partially willing to accept outside help with the blood mage problem.” Cassandra settled the sheaf of papers on the table. “And judging by the information he has provided, it is a problem that must be handled before focusing on the Order.”

Varric leafed through a few pages, muttering to himself under his breath. He stiffened suddenly. “I _know_ this stuff, Seeker. It’s obviously not the originals, but Hawke collected parts of this from all over Kirkwall.”

“Kirkwall’s Champion collected this?” Fabian asked. “Why would the Order have it then?”

Varric shrugged eloquently. “They must have raided the Amell estate for every scrap of evidence they could find after...” he trailed off and dismissed the question with a shake of his head. He rallied quickly, as if he hadn’t fallen silent at all. “We found these all over the city. Some group calling themselves ‘The Band of Three’ was investigating why Kirkwall was so important to ancient Tevinter.”

Cassandra nodded. “I had heard rumours of such a task being created by the Seekers of Truth, but the scholars disappeared without a trace. Most were of the belief that they had been killed by the apostate they had recruited to their task. Incidences of abominations are common in Kirkwall.”

Fabian settled his feet back on the table, ignoring a scowl from Cassandra. “Everyone in the Free Marches knows why Kirkwall used to be important. It was a quarry and slave port. Lots and lots of stone and misery is about all the city is good for.”

Varric rolled his eyes. “Of course that’s what they tell you in Ansburg. Anyway, this Band of Three had the theory that Kirkwall being a quarry and port city was just a cover story. Being the centre of the slave trade through the region was what was really interesting to the old Imperium. Blood mages and a constant source of blood.” He stabbed a finger on the first page. “Whatever they found here was enough to get two of the three killed. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to mess around with this, Seeker.”

“I have no choice,” Cassandra replied. “I must finish my investigation before I know what actions are needed in Kirkwall.”

She pulled the loose leaves of paper towards her and extracted a section that had concerned her the most. Whatever evidence might have accompanied the journal excerpts was long gone. Destroyed, if the author’s account was to be believed. That seemed wise given the hints that had been left behind. But there was enough to chill any templar or seeker to the bone. Whatever the old Imperium had been doing here was magic of the darkest, most forbidden kind.

“‘It is well known that the Veil is thin in Kirkwall,’” she quoted. “’But we have discovered the magisters were deliberately thinning it even further’.” She shuddered. “Little wonder that failed Harrowings and blood magic were so common in their Circle. The Gallows was clearly a foolish place to house mages.”

Fabian nodded in agreement. “With all the deaths after the chantry explosion and whatever the blood mages are doing, Maker knows how thin the Veil must be now.”

“Kirkwall has a _long_ history of blood magic,” Varric added grimly. “Meredith might be-” he caught himself, “have been mad, but it turns out there’s a good reason to be paranoid about blood mages everywhere.” He grimaced. “I suppose Knight-Captain Cullen is following in her footsteps.”

“His stability is … questionable at best,” Cassandra replied cautiously. “But unfortunately, he may not be entirely wrong. This,” she scowled down at the journal excerpts, “is a far more immediate threat.”

Cassandra unfolded a larger document and smoothed the folds out over the surface of the table. A dense map of Kirkwall covered every corner of the crisp parchment. Bright red lines traced complex patterns across the black ink marking the streets. With those marked out, Kirkwall’s tangled layout made far more sense. The sharp turns, the oddly placed squares, the confusing dead ends. All there for a reason.

Varric and Fabian frowned at the page, flicking confused looks back at her, but it wasn’t their reaction that Cassandra was looking for. Fabian and his force were Seeker auxiliaries, there to provide extra manpower for the Seekers of Truth when needed. Fighting against mages, demons, and abominations was the extent of his knowledge on magic. Cassandra hardly expected Varric to know more. But this was the kind of knowledge that a templar or a seeker would have been trained to recognise. Cassandra knew precisely what she was looking at in that web of red lines. So would a blood mage.

“Runes,” Merrill gasped as she peered at the map. “The streets are runes.”

“Indeed,” Cassandra replied curtly. She focused an icy look on the elf. “Tell me what they represent, blood mage.”

From the corner of her eye, Cassandra saw Fabian stiffen suddenly. He swept his legs off the table and his hand dropped out of view to rest on the hilt of his sword.

“Orders, Seeker?” he asked quietly. His relaxed posture dissolved to leave a dangerous stillness. However casually he might act, he was all deadly competence when it mattered. No one associated with the Order or the Seekers could fail to have such a reaction to a blood mage.  Clearly Varric had chosen not to mention Merrill’s background to a mage hunter.

“She is an ally. Of sorts,” Cassandra informed him curtly. “What can you tell me, Merrill?”

Merrill traced a line with a finger. “I don’t know, exactly. But these are like summoning runes, only … not?” She looked over at Cassandra. “I want to help, Seeker Pentaghast, but I really don’t know how else to describe it.”

Cassandra settled back, goosebumps rippling over her skin. Summoning runes. A thinning of the veil going back years. She didn’t want to think what it all might mean. Never mind the appearance of a mysterious form of lyrium that hadn’t been seen anywhere else in Thedas, even in Orzammar, where lyrium had been mined for hundreds of years. The templars were clearly opposing the blood magic plaguing Kirkwall. And yet it felt wrong.

“And the blood runes that have been left over the city?”

Merrill shrugged. “I don’t recognise those,” she replied apologetically.

Cassandra looked down at the map. If she were a person prone to laying bets, she would say that the smaller runes were somehow linked to these city-scale ones. If only information had been gathered on the locations of those runes. Her eyes widened suddenly. She _did_ have two locations.  
“Varric,” she asked cautiously. “Where is the Jacosta & Sons warehouse? And the location to which you and Merrill led me?”

Varric stabbed a blunt finger down on the map to indicate each location after a moment’s thought. He blinked down at each point. Both lay at the epicentre of grand runes. “Ah. That can’t be good.”

“Quite,” Cassandra replied with a dry sarcasm that only barely covered a sudden shiver.

“I would assume this is a very bad thing, Seeker Pentaghast.” Fabian’s curt statement seemed far too loud in the quiet confines of Merrill’s small home.

“Nothing blood mages do can be good,” she replied finally.

Varric’s hand twitched convulsively for the crossbow that never seemed to leave his side. “Let me guess. You want to go down into Darktown to see what’s happening there.”

Cassandra nodded slowly. “I need to find out what it is that had the scholars so concerned. Or at the very least, ascertain how it is connected to what is happening in Kirkwall now.”

There was no ‘if it was connected’ to her mind now. It would be naïve to believe that there wasn’t some remnant of that legacy still left in Kirkwall. Cassandra didn’t believe in coincidence. There had to be some link between the city’s past and present. There was a connection here. Somehow.

She snapped a look over at Fabian, still tautly ready with most of his attention on a seemingly oblivious Merrill. “Captain Fabian, how soon can you bring the rest of your men into Kirkwall?”

Fabian reluctantly focused his entire attention on Cassandra. “That depends. Quietly or not?”

“Quietly. Maker willing, we will be able to wait for reinforcements once I have enough information to know what is required. Assuming the Circles haven’t collapsed completely while I was in the Gallows,” she finished in a muttered undertone.

“And if not, better we’re near enough to provide support,” Fabian supplied with a brusque nod. “It’ll take a couple of days to get everyone in quietly. Any faster and someone will notice. But judging by what the dwarf tells me, there aren’t enough of us to raid the Gallows, so try not to get yourself captured again. Can’t say I enjoy the idea of a suicide mission.”

“I will try and avoid that,” Cassandra replied dryly. “But the risk paid off.”

Varric cleared his throat. “You’re missing a kind of important detail, Seeker. Darktown is a maze. How are you going to find what you’re looking for now that the tunnels are crawling with blood mages and who knows what else? You’re basically a templar, and they don’t dare go in there. It’s a death wish.”

“Seekers are very good at tracking blood magic.” Cassandra and Fabian turned a look on Merrill at almost the same instant. “And I already have someone who might both help me avoid suspicion and recognise what I cannot.”

Merrill’s shoulder slumped under the combined gaze. “I don’t like the sound of this,” she said quietly. “Darktown is not a good place to be for anyone.”

“Come on, Seeker. You can’t ask Daisy to do that,” Varric protested.

“How else would you propose I safely enter Darktown?” Cassandra responded with an incredulous laugh. “I can assure you, blood mages are far less welcoming to Seekers than renegade templars are.”

Varric’s expression had become an angry mask. “Can’t you wait until the rest of your men get here rather than dragging her along with you?”

“I don’t need you to defend me, Varric,” Merrill sighed before Cassandra could manage a response. “I’ll help you, Seeker Pentaghast. But you need to trust me.”

Cassandra glared at Merrill for a long moment before releasing an exasperated groan. “I trust you as much as the templars here. That will have to be sufficient.”

Merrill stood abruptly from her seat. “Close enough. We should leave now. It’s early. If we’re lucky, we can be back before curfew.”

“Don’t get yourself killed,” Cassandra heard Fabian call out as she stepped back out into the street behind Merrill.

“I am being given that warning far too often for comfort,” Cassandra muttered to herself.

The serene calm of the courtyard under the vhenadahl’s spreading canopy didn’t seem particularly comforting any more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Despite the fact that I needed Merrill, I actually have no idea how to write her well, hence why she’s been in the background quite a lot. Apologies for that, or any odd characterisation.


	7. Into Darktown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassandra ventures into the Darktown to investigate Kirkwall's blood magic problem

 

> _The blood of countless slaves was spilled beneath the city in sacrifice. Whole buildings were built upon lakes of blood. The sewers have grooves where blood would flow, all leading down. The scale is hard to fathom._
> 
> _—Hidden behind a rock with curious markings and signed, "The Band of Three"_

 

No one could truly guess how many entrances into Darktown were scattered over Kirkwall. Every Hightown resident had extended their cellars at some point. A little more space, a little lower, until it was hard to say where exactly the cellars stopped and Darktown began. There was always a way in for those who knew the city. And for those who didn’t know the city, there was always some way to stumble unintentionally into Darktown and never find a way back out again.

The best known routes and main thoroughfares had been blocked by the Order. Slowly but surely, they had sealed every one they found within the districts most firmly under their control. But for every entrance the Order found and sealed, there was another.

The entrance to which Merrill led Cassandra was one that she could easily believe had been missed, back when Templars had occupied this part of the city. Along too many back routes to count, through private courtyards, and finally, this grafittied back alley. Rough stone steps at the far end led down into a tunnel that seemed pitch black compared to the bright sunlight above ground. Only the Gallows itself could look less welcoming.

Cassandra spent a cautious few minutes scanning the area for watchers. In these contested districts of Lowtown, there had barely even been any citizens on the streets. The complete silence around them was a stark contrast to the bustle of the heavily guarded regions under templar control. She wasn’t sure whether to be worried or grateful that there was nothing and no one to be seen. There wasn’t even the hum of an active spell or subdued glitter that might indicate a magical means of securing the entrance.

“Is it truly this easy to enter Darktown?” she asked Merrill in a low murmur.

Merrill shrugged. “Why bother making it difficult?”

Cassandra had to acknowledge that it was a good point. She had been thinking like a martially-oriented templar, expecting anything of importance to be guarded and watched, much like the heavily manned checkpoint they had passed through as they left Templar-controlled regions. But blood mages didn’t need force of arms when they could boil the blood in your veins with a thought. Judging by the officer in charge’s parting comments, he hadn’t expected to see them come back through the checkpoint, and that had been without knowing they were heading into Darktown. Perhaps if he had known, he might have made more effort to dissuade them from passing out from under the Order’s protection. As it was, they cared far more about people entering their districts than they did those leaving. No one in their right mind went _into_ tunnels full of blood mages and Maker knew what else. It was as good as offering yourself up as an easy source of blood. No one in their right mind infiltrated a city under martial law either, but here she was. The life of a Seeker could never be called an easy one.

As they descended the steps, Cassandra was struck by the abrupt change in temperature. Only a few feet below ground level, and even the weak breeze from above was absent. The passages were as cold, musty and airless as a tomb. Given how many must have died after the tunnel collapses, it seemed to be an apt description. What little light filtered down from the entrance barely lit more than a few feet ahead of them.

Cassandra squinted into the impenetrable darkness, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Her skin prickled as a sudden bloom of warm light illuminated the route ahead of them. The source hovered and bounced over Merrill’s head, casting flickering shadows around them. She closed her mouth on a protest. A magical source of light was a far less likely to draw unwanted attention than a torch.

Cassandra strained her senses for some sign of magic as they walked. If the spell was powerful enough, or used for a great enough period of time, there was always some lingering trace to be found. Circles were always full of those signs. An active Circle even more so. For those without a mage’s natural affinity for magic, it took a Seeker’s training or a Templar’s sensitivity to be aware of anything but the most obvious traces. Practice long enough and it was possible to recognise and differentiate the subtle markers. A sense of oppressive malice might herald a dangerous thinning of the veil. Copper and decay for blood magic. Even a prickling in the skin might mean something. The skill — one which Seekers gave far more attention to developing than Templars ever bothered with — was to know what was simply a trick of the mind and what was a genuine trace. And then to hunt that source down.

Here, so close to the surface, there was nothing to be sensed. Only the sound of their footsteps echoing from the undressed sandstone walls. There wasn’t even a bloody hand daubed on a wall to suggest they were in the right place. Small hope that she would find what she was looking for within minutes of entering Darktown.

“You don’t trust me very much, Seeker Pentaghast,” Merrill stated, voice oddly flat in the enclosed passage.

“You are a blood mage. I am-” Cassandra caught herself. Maker knew how far her voice could carry and who might be listening. “I am justifiably cautious,” she finished.

“Blood magic isn’t evil,” Merrill replied. “Not any more than any other kind of magic.”

Cassandra’s only reply was an incredulous bark of laughter. She had lost count of the number of times a blood mage had claimed they weren’t doing anything wrong whilst standing at the end of a trail of bodies.

“It can help if you use it properly,” Merrill insisted. She looked over at Cassandra, an uncharacteristically intense look on her face. “It can help more than that sword can.”

“There is no ‘proper’ use of blood magic,” Cassandra responded, as vehement as she could be given how low she needed to keep her voice. “Maybe your intentions were entirely virtuous. Stranger things have happened. But how did you learn it? A demon? Nothing good can come of those dealings.”

The magelight bobbed erratically as Merrill looked away. “I know the price I paid. I had the same argument with Hawke.”

“The Champion was wise to be cautious.”

“Caution didn’t help very much against Meredith,” Merrill replied quietly.

Cassandra acknowledged that comment with an irritated grunt. In the end, it had been Meredith’s own decisions that indirectly resulted in her death, by the hand of a loyal subordinate of all things. It was a tale she had seen time and time again. Seeking more power never ended well. That had always been true, regardless of whether the culprit was a templar or a mage.

The passage they were following abruptly widened out into a chamber that might once have been called spacious. Now, half of that ceiling had collapsed. It was obvious that this place had once been inhabited. Perhaps even what passed for a market. There was a stall crushed by a chunk of stone in one corner. The faded remnants of cloth that might have added scraps of  colour to the otherwise oppressive tunnels dotted the few walls still exposed, now so covered in dust that they were a uniform brown.

Cassandra shivered and found herself walking a little more cautiously through the space, skirting collapsed pieces of wall and ceiling. For years, Darktown had been home to refugees fleeing the Blight in Ferelden. It was difficult to imagine what life must have been like down here, but it was all too easy to imagine the panic that must have struck when the first aftershocks rippled through Darktown. Maker knew how many had been trapped in collapses like this.

There was no sign of a way onwards, aside from a rickety mine elevator that looked moments away from crumbling into a pile of rust and woodchips. Every shudder and lurch had Cassandra’s heart in her mouth. It was a testament to the durability of dwarven engineering that they were saved from plummeting straight down. Rough sandstone transitioned into undressed raw stone as the elevator made its unsteady way downwards. They were deep underground now.

Cassandra stopped mid step as the elevator reached the bottom of the shaft and exchanged a look with Merrill. Despite where they were, she felt a trickle of anticipation. There was something at the very fringes of her senses. Not the tell-tale copper and decay of blood magic, but still something.

“Do you feel anything, Merrill?”

Merrill closed her eyes, brow furrowing with concentration. “It’s not an active casting, but it could be demonic,” she said cautiously.

“Worth investigating.”

Merrill’s eyes snapped open again and she turned on a heel to head down a narrow passage barely wide enough for the two of them to walk abreast. They cut down one cave-like passage after another, slipping through collapses where they could and finding routes around those that blocked passages entirely.

Cassandra drew to an abrupt halt as they rounded another corner and sighed in exasperation. A mining team from Orzammar would have been ideal. For all she knew, these passages did connect up to the Deep Roads in places. But unfortunately, they had nothing of the sort.

“Maker,” she muttered. “Another collapse.”

Merrill shook her head. “But it should be right he-” she stammered to a stop. “Oh.”

Fallen rubble shifted. What had looked like a patch of shadow resolved into a dessicated arm, stained with blood so old it was black. A croaking shriek drowned out the sound of the rockfall shifting as one, and then two, and then three withered  corpses lurched into the dim glow of Merrill’s magelight.

Cassandra drew her sword with a hiss. “Maker. There are your ‘demonic’ traces, Merrill.”

The razor edge of Cassandra’s sword bit deeply into a corpse’s arm as it swiped at her. It pulled away from the impediment as if it were as inconsequential as a minor scratch. It took far more than surface wounds to stop a possessed corpse. She very nearly turned on Merrill when she felt the familiar sensation of blood magic in the air.

“What do you think you are doing?” she barked out as she diverted the flailing corpse. It tumbled off balance and collapsed into a heap beside her, already scrabbling for Cassandra’s boots.

“Helping,” Merrill called out.

A tumble of rocks shot out from the collapse and crushed the corpse. Cassandra growled and moved on to the next. The last thing she wanted was to have ‘help’ from a blood mage.

A spirit bolt whistled past Cassandra with a whine, blowing a hole clear through a corpse that had barely managed to pull itself out from under the collapse. A stone fist bowled it away to the sound of snapping bones, allowing Cassandra to finish off the third, temporarily stunned by the blowback of the spirit bolt. The final possessed corpse fell at Cassandra’s feet, head bouncing off to come to rest somewhere in the shadows at the end of the tunnel.

“What in the void is going on here?” a voice called out sharply from behind them. “You’re supposed to keep them, not kill them!”

Cassandra snapped about to find the source of the voice. Merrill’s ball of light flickered and dimmed for a moment, as if it were as surprised as Cassandra. The newcomer stood at the passage’s entrance, exasperated scowl lit by the glow of a magelight with the disconcertingly cheerful hue of a warm fireplace. Her sleeves had been pushed up above her elbows to reveal countless slashes over her arms that ranged from thin white scars to raw red marks that had barely begun to heal. Either she had no skill in healing magic, or they were a badge of pride to mark her allegiance. If every blood mage was so easy to identify, Seekers would never be necessary.

“Why?” she managed to growl. Her grip tightened on the hilt of her sword. A life-time’s worth of training demanded she attack immediately. In this situation, she was forced to acknowledge that it was likely not to be the best instinct.

The woman ignored the question and looked past Cassandra to study Merrill. “I don’t recognise you. We don’t get many Dalish down here.” She nodded to the dagger in Merrill’s hand. With blood magic, there was no need to rely on a staff as a focus for the energies of the Fade. “But you’re in the right place. Your sword-wielding friend, however, is not.”

“I am her bodyguard,” Cassandra supplied, saving Merrill from attempting to find a believable explanation.

The woman raised an eyebrow. “Against the corpses? It’s perfectly safe down here, for those with the right … talents.” Her wide smile became predatory. “You’re risking a lot by being here.”

“She’s a friend,” Merrill interjected.

The smile thinned. “I meant no insult, of course, Serah.” She folded her arms. “You’re going in the wrong direction.”

“For what?” Cassandra questioned.

Judging by the woman’s brief scowl, Cassandra hadn’t done quite as good a job at moderating the aggression in her voice as she had hoped.

“Maybe your … friend, should keep out of business to which she can’t contribute,” she said lightly to Merrill, pointedly ignoring Cassandra. “Head out and to the left. Markers have been left for people with our kind of talents.”

A raw cut split open as the woman pointed back down the passage. A thin trickle of glistening blood oozed out, but rather than dripping down to the ground, it coiled about her forearm like a bracelet. She didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh. Thank you,” Merrill replied. “Um. Where does it go?”

“We need every mage we can get,” she replied. “Go there if you want to help. I won’t say more than that.”

Cassandra wished she had thought to provide Merrill with a line of questioning to follow on her behalf. “How long have you been down here?” she asked.

“Since the chantry explosion. I was a Senior-” The blood mage stopped suddenly and looked between Merrill and Cassandra, confused about why so few of the questions were coming from her fellow blood mage. “You pry an awful lot for a bodyguard,” she stated flatly, eyes narrowing.

The trickle of blood thickened and wove about her fingers. She snapped her hand up in front of her. Crushing force closed about Cassandra’s chest and threw her back. Her vision momentarily went black and she gasped as she felt the raw slash on her side split open. Miraculously, she managed to hold onto her sword, but pinned against the wall, it didn’t do her any good. She mustered her fragmented concentration to draw on the powers that were almost but not quite like those of a templar.

“We need every living body we can get,” the woman snapped. “You don’t need a bodyguard down here.”

“No!” Merrill called out. The rough walls around them rumbled threateningly and a few loose stones bounced down from the collapsed passageway. Cassandra held back from releasing the focused energy she had been gathering. “I need her!”

The woman narrowed her eyes at Merrill. “I see. A portable supply of blood, then.” She lowered her hand, allowing Cassandra to drop to the floor. “If you truly need her, you can keep her.”

Before the woman could turn her attention back to Cassandra, she took a few quick steps forward, bringing her sword up. The blood mage let out a wet cough as a foot of honed steel pierced through her chest. Cassandra allowed her to fall to the ground, dodging a burst of blood that leapt towards her, crackling and spitting angrily. It seared through stone wall behind her, filling the air with the acrid stench of burnt blood.

Merrill’s startled gasp echoed in the enclosed space. “Why did you do that? She could have told you something else.”

“She might have informed someone about her suspicions. And she was a blood mage,” Cassandra replied with curt finality.

“So am I,” Merrill replied indignantly.

“Do not remind me.” Cassandra cleaned off her sword and sheathed a little more forcefully than necessary. “But-” she cut off and released a disgusted groan. These were words she had never expected to say to a blood mage. “Thank you for stepping in. You could have let her kill me.”

A small smile flickered across Merrill’s face. “I promised to help, Seeker Pentaghast.”

“I suppose you did,” Cassandra allowed grudgingly. She stepped over the fallen corpses and out into the main thoroughfare. “Can you find these markers that she mentioned?”

Merrill studied the passage wall, brushing a hand against the rough stone on either side. Cassandra followed suit. So far as she could see, it was just a wall. If there was something to be found in that crumbling stone, it wasn’t something that she could identify.

Merrill frowned and shook her head. “I can’t think what she meant. It must be concealed some- Oh!” Her face suddenly lit up. The bobbing light over her shoulder shivered. Between one blink and the next, the light it cast changed from the warmth of torchlight to the virulent green of the raw Fade. Under that lighting, the passageway seemed far more unwelcoming, but on the wall just beyond Merrill, a crude arrow drawn in fiery lines pointed away from them. “I’ve never seen veilfire runes outside of elven ruins,” she said wonderingly.

Any reluctance she had had for entering Darktown was lost in her fascination with the mark on the wall. She traced the simple lines with a finger, lips moving as she whispered under her breath.

“For good reason,” Cassandra muttered. She gave the rune on the wall a dubious look. “Most texts on veilfire are restricted from Circle libraries.”

Merrill glanced over her shoulder with a frown for Cassandra. “That seems a little unnecessary. It’s not blood magic, it’s an ancient elven art.”

“Whatever it is, we do not have time to study it.” Cassandra nodded in the direction indicated by the arrow. “We must move on before something even less willing to talk stumbles across us.”

* * *

If Kirkwall was a maze, Darktown was far worse. Cassandra could feel the nauseating traces of old and new blood magic lingering everywhere around them. But without the eerie green of Merrill’s magelight to help guide their way, it would have been an impossible task to navigate the collapses across the network of tunnels and caverns.

She was oddly grateful for the complexity of the Darktown tunnels. The few others they spotted sharing a passageway with them were easily dodged. Those they could not avoid did nothing more than nod in acknowledgement, Merrill’s glowing magelight proving enough to allow them to pass without comment. But every person they passed chilled Cassandra’s blood a little further. To a person, they bore the markers of a blood mage with pride. This could only be a small fraction of the total. Kirkwall had to be hosting a small army of them.

Cassandra’s eyes widened as they stumbled out of a passage and into the echoing confines of a dry and disused sewer tunnel. There was no mistaking the familiar pulsating red glow that warred with the unnatural green of Merrill’s veilfire globe.

“What is red lyrium doing down here?” she murmured to herself.

A few steps further in and the source became horrifically clear. There was a quiet gasp from Merrill as the hazy red gleam resolved itself a pile of bodies. Templar corpses were stacked up indiscriminately in a niche. Wide red eyes stared blindly. Glittering crystal growths burst from bodies and climbed up the walls until it was difficult to make out the source point. But instead of the scent of rot and decay, there was only the acrid smell of the air after lightning. Whatever corruption they hosted had run rampant now that they were dead. They were more lyrium than human.

Cassandra reluctantly crouched by the closest corpse. It was hard to tell past the ashen tone that all the corrupt templars shared, but they looked withered enough that they had to have been drained of blood. It wasn’t especially surprising, but it was worrying nonetheless.

“This is horrible,” Merrill whispered. “Not even templars deserve this.”

Cassandra stood with a sigh and studied the pile of bodies. “No. However corrupt they might have become, no one deserves this.”

“You probably don’t want to hear this,” Merrill began tentatively, “but I can understand why they might have been drained.”

“As do I,” Cassandra replied with a dark look for Merrill.

Templar blood was a paradox. The processed lyrium it carried granted them the power to deny magic. And yet, to a mage, that same lyrium reinforced their magical abilities. Templar blood and the lyrium it contained was much like the dilute lyrium potions a mage might use, and would provide a far stronger source of magical power than a non-templar’s blood. And red lyrium? From what she had seen, it provided far more strength than chantry lyrium. It didn’t take a large leap of logic to assume it would for a blood mage too.She shivered and stepped away from the bodies. The sooner they could leave Darktown, the better.

The relief at leaving behind the dumping ground was short lived. It turned out that templars weren’t the only bodies to be found down here. One after another, sewer tunnels and chambers were filled with the dead. The stench of decay coated the back of Cassandra’s throat. Years of training and experience as a Seeker hadn’t prepared her for the sheer magnitude of bodies down here. There had to be hundreds of them, piled up like firewood in side chambers and dead ends. It was quite simply horrific.

When they stumbled across another passer-by, Cassandra didn’t stop to ask questions of him. Bared arms criss-crossed with the markers of blood magic were enough to condemn him in her eyes. His headless corpse joined a pile against a wall. His bound demon was sent shrieking back into the Fade, but it didn’t take a mage to know that the Veil was thinner than paper down here. It felt as if there were demons just out of view, watching from the distant shadows that Merrill’s magelight couldn’t dispel. The fact that none of the corpses were possessed was a worse sign than it might seem. The demons had to have been drawn elsewhere.

Cassandra shuddered to a halt, bloody sword hanging limply at her side. She felt numb. “Maker,” she whispered. “I have seen more than enough. We need to get out of here.”

Merrill’s voice was very small as she replied. Her face was almost as ashen as those of the dead. “Please.”

Every passage looked the same as the other. They did their best to trace their way in reverse, following the shimmering glitter of veilfire arrows on the walls. Every passageway and tunnel seemed a little narrower, a little more oppressive. Each passer-by they dodged seemed a little more threatening. Each pile of bodies they passed seemed to be another pointed accusation aimed directly at Cassandra. The Chantry should never have left Kirkwall for so long.

Eager as she was to return to the distant sunlit surface, it took a moment for her to notice a sound beyond the echoes of their footsteps. She cocked her head. Distantly, so faint that she wasn’t quite sure it was anything another echo, she could hear the sound of discordant humming.

“Do you hear that?” she asked, drawing to a sudden stop.

A large part of her was convinced it was an auditory hallucination. Some lingering trace left by her time in the Gallows. But now that it wasn’t hidden by the sound of their feet, the hum was even more obvious. Without a profusion of lyrium crystal to resonate in sympathy, it seemed to be a far hollower and less threatening noise, but it was still familiar.

“Hear what?”

“Humming.”

Merrill was silent for a moment before shaking her head. She hunched back into herself with a shiver. “A breeze from somewhere, probably.”

Cassandra shook her head. “No, I do not think so.” She listened a moment longer and turned back to head down a narrow passage they had just passed. “This way.”

The humming grew louder as the strode onwards, until Merrill stiffened. She too had caught the distant humming from an almost human throat. The discordant buzz was an aching sound, rising and falling in unpredictable and uncomfortable intervals. They turned another corner, drawing closer to the noise.

Cassandra caught Merrill’s arm and drew her back. “Dim your light,” she hissed.

She was quite certain that it was a corrupt templar humming from somewhere down that passage. Inconveniently and unsurprisingly, a pair of despair demons lurked just inside a rough carven doorway, blocking their path to the source of the hum.

Cassandra stroked the hilt of her sword and leaned against the passage wall. Bound demons made the perfect guards. They never grew tired. They could never be distracted. That single-minded attention on whoever or whatever lay inside could be advantageous if they intended to sneak past, but Cassandra rather doubted they would let anyone walk in. They were easy to kill for a Seeker, but instinct told her to be cautious.

Merrill retreated from where she had been looking around the corner. The barely visible glow of her light caught in her eyes as she joined Cassandra. “Only two demons,” she whispered. “That shouldn’t be a problem for us.”

“No,” Cassandra agreed, equal quiet. “But there might be some form of magical alarm, or perhaps other guards we cannot see.” She cocked her head at Merrill. There were advantages to working with mages. “Can you sense anything of that sort?”

Merrill closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. When she opened them again, her expression was haunted. “There are a lot of restless spirits somewhere in these passages.” She shivered. “But no spells, and nothing apart from those demons.”

“Then we move, and pray no one hears.”

The despair demons emitted croaking groans as they spotted Cassandra launching herself towards them. Lipless mouths bared teeth in a painful grimaces as they sloped through the open doorway, beams of bitter frost crackling from between skeletal fingers. A narrow miss froze the leathers on Cassandra’s arm. Sheets of ice cracked off as she raised her sword to catch the next blast. She pushed in close and sent the demon shrieking back into the fade with a slash that detached its head from its body. The other fell to a flurry of spirit of bolts that punched holes through its insubstantial form.

Cassandra swept through the doorway and into the room, sword held at the ready. She froze before she could survey the small chamber for additional threats.

Now that they were in the room, the hum resolved itself into the Chant, albeit with a tempo that was ever so slightly wrong. The source was something out of a nightmare. A templar Knight-Corporal who seemed more crystal than human. Huge growths of lyrium had overtaken his body, fusing him to the walls against which he slumped. He seemed to have been almost immobilised by the sheer weight of the substance. An angry red glow pulsed around him, emphasising the hollow gauntness of his face.

The templar raised his head and studied them wearily with gleaming red eyes. The humming Chant cut off. “You don’t look much like a blood mage,” he stated resignedly. His gaze flickered over Cassandra and Merrill, looking for something with hungry, desperate eyes.

“I am a Seeker. What happened to you?” Cassandra questioned, voice laced with concern as she crouched to bring her eyes level with the templar’s. Maker knew how long he had been here to lead to this unrestricted growth of lyrium. Maker knew what he had seen or been subjected to in that time.

The templar’s laugh might have been weak, but it dripped with scorn. “Of course. A Seeker. They either turn up when they’re not wanted,” he paused to haul in a painful breath, “or too late to do much good.” His eyes flickered over her again, pausing on pockets and pouches. “I don’t suppose you brought any lyrium?”

Those few sentences seemed far too much for him. He wheezed painfully, chest barely rising beneath the weight of crystal, and his eyes fluttered closed.

“Stay awake, Knight-Corporal,” Cassandra ordered. The templar’s eyes fluttered open again and he mustered up enough energy to scowl at her. “Merrill,” Cassandra asked, turning her attention to the elf behind her, “Can you do something for him. Healing perhaps?”

Merrill stopped a cautious distance from the raw lyrium and raised her hands, green-hued sparks ghosting around her hands. “I was never any good at healing,” she said apologetically after a moment’s concentration. “There’s too much lyrium in him for me to do anything.”

The templar’s expression turned stormy. “I thought you said you were a Seeker,” he managed to growl. “You’re working with a _mage_?”

Cassandra’s skin tingled suddenly and Merrill gasped. The templar might barely be able to keep his eyes open, but the oppressive deadness in the already still air indicated he had silenced magic in the vicinity. For once, she wished templar training didn’t go to quite so much effort to ensure that initiates could wield their abilities through any level of distraction or injury.

“Knight-Corporal,” she barked, praying her raised voice wouldn’t draw unwelcome attention. He ignored her, still fixed entirely on Merrill. She recognised the tightening focus of a templar ready to call on a smite. “Knight-Corporal! If you want my help, you will stand down!”

Blazing scarlet eyes snapped to her, their restrained fury completely at odds with his obvious weakness. “As ordered. Seeker,” he spat. “Tell me what you want.”

“Answer my questions and we can help you escape.”

Cassandra kept her expression neutral, hiding her thoughts. Even had he not been too weak to even raise his head, the jagged crystal growths had merged with the walls. They would have to be broken to free him, and Maker knew what kind of harm that might do to him. There was no chance this templar was ever leaving. Sometimes, Seekers had to deceive to fulfil their duties.

“That would be nice,” he wheezed contemplatively, anger forgotten in a moment. “Knight-Commander Meredith would execute me immediately rather than this slow death.”

Cassandra hesitated and studied the slumped form. “How long have you been down here?”

“I can’t be sure. Too long.”

“When were you captured?”

“The beginning of Cloudreach,” he replied. The brusque responses of a templar making a report to a superior were a stark contrast to the horror behind his eyes. “Not that it matters.”

“Merciful Maker,” Cassandra murmured. “Seven months. How are you still alive?”

With a wince, he brushed a hand over the crystal that immobilised him before his arm dropped limply back to his side. “All I need is lyrium these days. They give me that. But not enough.” His sudden laugh was a painfully sharp sound. Whatever scrap of willpower had allowed him to remain steady seemed to be dissolving. “Never enough.”

“I have never heard of a templar living on lyrium alone,” Cassandra replied incredulously.

He managed to give her a disdainful look. “Red lyrium is different. Better, we thought. They give me red if I answer their questions. Not enough. But they give it to me. No one can resist forever…” His eyes turned glassy and his breathing hitched. Cassandra had to lean closer to hear a voice that had dropped to a whisper. “They laugh when I beg for more. Maker have mercy. It hurts. Do you have any?” he asked again, pleading.

“How is that possible? The only red lyrium I have seen is in the Gallows.”

The templar broke out into wheezing laughter that went on for an uncomfortable length of time. When he stopped, a few tears sparkled with the reflected light of the crystal sprouting from his brow.

“Most of us thought it was a gift from the Maker at first,” he gasped through his fading laughter. “Our independence from the Chantry’s manipulations. We were tricked. Even the Knight-Commander. It’s not ours, it’s his. We’re just … tools. Blood and red lyrium for his magic.”

Cassandra rocked back, a cold shiver running down her spine. “Explain, Knight-Corporal,” she demanded. “Who?”

“I know I can’t escape,” he wheezed, voice heavy with wretched amusement. “Kill me, Seeker.”

“Answer me, Knight-Corporal.”

“I don’t know who!” he snapped in a buzzing shout that echoed discordantly about the small room. The muscles in his neck stood out as he tried to lean towards her. “Their leader! A Maker-forsaken monster!”

“Keep your voice down,” Cassandra hissed. “Unless you want to bring half of Darktown down on us.”

“I don’t care,” the templar sobbed. “Maybe they’ll finally kill me like they did everyone else.” He lapsed back into whispered lines of the chant, almost lost behind the buzz of red lyrium in his voice.

Merrill shifted by Cassandra’s shoulder. “Seeker Pentaghast, I really don’t think we should stay here. Someone will have heard.”

“I have to find out more,” Cassandra responded curtly.

“Please. Kill me, Seeker,” the templar begged, breaking off from the Chant. Any trace of the defiant, angry man who had tried only moments before to attack a mage had been burned away by despair. The demons had left a permanent scar on his mind. “Have mercy, even if the Maker will not.”

“I need to know what we face down here.”

“Demons. Blood mages,” the templar whispered to her. “That’s all that’s left of this cursed city. Tell the Knight-Commander that we made it worse, not better. Maker forgive us.”

“Seeker Pentaghast. There’s no time,” Merrill insisted. She hovered behind Cassandra’s shoulder, restlessly shifting from one foot to another.

Cassandra heard the distant sound of running feet and the hissing shriek of at least one shade. She growled in anger and turned back to the templar. “I need numbers, Knight-Corporal. Help me stop this.”

“I only ever saw a few. It doesn’t matter. It’s too late.” His hand shot up to grab Cassandra’s sword arm with the tortured shriek of grinding crystal. His eyes darted from her to the open doorway and back again. “Kill me. Quickly.”

Cassandra freed her arm with a tug and snapped to her feet. The footsteps were too close for comfort. She unsheathed her sword and rested the edge at the templar’s neck. “May you find redemption and rest by the Maker’s side.”

He closed his eyes and exhaled a moment before she drew the blade across his throat. Even in death, he didn’t look at peace. Cassandra didn’t know whether he merited sympathy or not.

She shook her head and resettled her hand more comfortably about the hilt of her sword. The first shade slipped into the room. Her skin tingled as overlapping plates of stone wrapped Merrill in magical armour. Cassandra’s sword split the shade in half. Whatever disguise Merrill’s presence might have offered her was long gone.

“Now, we run,” she ordered Merrill.


	8. Hints of a Grand Vision

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassandra leaves Darktown.

 

> _A blood mage can channel great power from a simple cut. At least a thousand unfortunates died here every year for centuries. For what ungodly purpose would one need so much power?_
> 
> _—Behind a panel with curious markings and signed, "The Band of Three"_

Cassandra leapt over the crumpled and steaming remains of the shade. This deep underground, no one truly expected to come under attack. The woman ambling slowly down the sewer passage barely seemed to be aware of her surroundings. One scarred hand toyed with the hilt of the dagger sheathed at her hip as she raised the other to hide a deep yawn. Her eyes widened in shock as she spotted Cassandra sweeping towards her, sword in hand. She barely had a chance to gasp in surprise before she was falling away, blood streaming from a wound far faster than it could be used to fuel a targeted spell.

And yet not quite quickly enough. The air rippled as the blood mage flopped limply to the ground. Too late, Cassandra felt the workings of a spell tingling in her skin. A piercing siren call shrieked through the passage, rising in pitch from tortured scream to the enraged shriek of a demon and beyond. The curved walls amplified it into something that was more solid force than actual sound, pulsing through the air and burrowing into Cassandra’s skull.

It tapered off in a wavering rattle as the mage gasped out her last breath. Or at least Cassandra assumed it had. Her ears were ringing far too much for her to judge. There was no hope of escaping unnoticed now. She dabbed lightly at an ear, checking for blood, and spun on a heel to grab Merrill’s arm. The elf seemed to shake herself out of a daze and met Cassandra’s gaze with a wide-eyed one of her own.

“Move!” Cassandra ordered. Her voice sounded dull, almost drowned out by the rushing of blood in her ears.

Merrill had to have been as deafened as she was, but she seemed to catch the meaning nonetheless. She nodded firmly and followed Cassandra as she broke into a ground-eating run down the passage. She prayed it was a direction that wouldn’t lead them directly into another mage.

The mould-stained walls of the sewer passage whipped past them on either side. Virulent green light bloomed ahead of them as Merrill conjured another magelight into being. Cassandra caught sight of another glowing arrow daubed on the wall, pointed away from the direction in which they were running. She took it as a sign that they were headed the right way.

The first sign that Cassandra’s hearing was returning was the echoing thud of heavy footsteps in pursuit. She risked a glance over her shoulder. Two mages. And behind them, the blazing forms of at least three rage demons painted the walls in angry orange. By a combination of sheer luck and reflexes, she dodged the fireballs that whistled towards them. A thin shield of rock leapt out of the passage floor just in time to block a crackling bolt of lightning. It skittered harmlessly over the sewer passage’s walls, the actinic glare briefly overcoming the gleam of Merrill’s magelight.

Distracted as she was by the mages behind them, she barely had time to react when another appeared from a side passage, stumbling directly into Cassandra’s path. It was hard to say who was more surprised. She managed to shift herself just in time to barge a shoulder into him, knocking him off balance. She caught a flash of confused, staring eyes. Felt the acid burn as stray ribbons of enchanted blood brushed against the exposed skin of her hand, curling around her wrist like a living creature.

She hissed and snatched back her hand. Even the brief second of contact had left angry red strips across her skin. That short moment as Cassandra reflexively flinched away was enough to give the man time to recover. The copper and decay of blood magic seared through her senses. A pulsing throb that demanded her unwavering obedience. Her limbs seemed reluctant to obey her commands. She stumbled and fell against a wall as he forced his will upon her mind. Her jaw ached as she gritted her teeth and inched one foot in front of the other. One step closer to the grimacing blood mage. Then another.

The man’s eyes bulged with the strain as Cassandra pitted her will against his own. “Templar,” he mouthed, face going slack with shock.

Another step, and Cassandra was close enough to whip the flat of her blade against his temple. He tumbled back and the incredible pressure against her mind faded.

Behind her, Merrill threw spell after spell down the passage to slow the approach of the others. Gnarled roots laced with bloody veins leapt from through solid stone, clutching at the advancing blood mages. A rage demon fell beneath a flurry of raw spirit bolts.

“Merrill,” Cassandra snapped, “can you collapse the passage?”

There was no delay in her reply. “Yes.”

“Do it,” Cassandra commanded, in the tone reserved for ordering scores of men.

A wicked dagger flashed in Merrill’s hand. The ground rumbled and shook beneath Cassandra’s feet as jagged cracks spidered across the walls. The approaching blood mages drew to a sharp halt, eyes wide. Any thought of casting a spell was forgotten as they tried to scramble away from the first chunks of falling stone. A rage demon was caught squarely in the rockfall, is angry roar lost in the deeper rumble of the collapsing passage. There was a bright burst of molten liquid as it was crushed.

Merrill slumped to one knee as the final rocks tumbled down and a wave of dust rolled across them. She coughed weakly, but a smile flickered across her ashen face as she looked back at Cassandra. “There.”

Cassandra nodded a curt acknowledgement and scanned the passage. It had fallen silent now, aside from the odd rattle as smaller rocks settled into place. It would take time for them to break through, if they ever could. Maker willing, they had been delayed enough to give her time.

She turned back to her captive blood mage and kicked him in the ribs. His eyes flickered open and he broke down into a spate of ragged coughing, tears streaming from his eyes as he blinked desperately against the dust hanging in the air. Cassandra looked on without any sympathy. A simple trick of Seeker training allowed her to force her own will on the mage, denying him access to the Fade. So long as he had no open wounds to draw from, there was nothing he could do to them.

“Blighted templar,” the man cursed when he could finally catch a breath. He winced as he raised a hand to the lump on his head. “Maker knows how you made it this far.”

“Do not take the Maker’s name in vain, Maleficar,” Cassandra growled. “I am no templar. But you will answer my questions. Quickly.”

The man somehow managed to look amused at Cassandra’s irritable reply. “I don’t think so,” he laughed.

Cassandra shook her head and stood on the hand that had been reaching for a fallen dagger. “The punishment for the use of forbidden magic is Tranquility,” she said idly. “Some believe it to be a fate worse than death.”

“You couldn’t make me Tranquil,” he retorted quickly. The certainty in his voice seemed rather hollow given his sudden intake of breath. His arm strained beneath Cassandra’s boot, fingers stretching towards the distant dagger. “You need tools or … or something.”

Cassandra gave him a vicious smile. He was right, but she hardly needed to tell him that. “Are you willing to take that risk?” She raised her hands, weighing the options. “Tranquility, or answer a few simple questions.” She dropped her hands and studied him, disgust curling her lips into a grimace. “What are you doing in Kirkwall?”

“Nothing,” the man replied defiantly. He groaned as Cassandra increased the pressure of her will on his mind. “Wait, wait! Kirkwall was the site of a vast undertaking by the Tevinter Imperium. We’re just following in those footsteps.”

“Why?”

He shrugged awkwardly with one shoulder and tried to shift his arm out from under Cassandra’s boot. “Knowledge. There is so much we don’t know. About the Fade. The Veil.” A sly smile twisted his face. “The Black City.”

“Merciful Maker. Why?”

“Every self-respecting mage wants to know more _,_ _”_ he sneered. “Your knife-ear friend over there understands. Don’t think I can’t recognise a fellow blood mage.”

Merrill glanced up from where she had slumped against a wall. “I am nothing like you,” she retorted wearily.

“Who leads you?”

“We accept no leaders,” he spat. “We are not like you Chantry lackeys.”

Cassandra ground the man’s arm into the grimy stone of the passage floor. “Who?”

“He calls himself the Conductor.” He gestured with his free arm, as if he could take in the entire city. He seemed almost excited as he spoke. “It’s a shame that people like you can’t recognise his vision.”

“The Conductor? I need a name, not some adopted title,” Cassandra barked. “And where can he be found?”

“The heart of the spell. Beneath where the chantry once stood,” he laughed delightedly. “Please. Go. I won’t stop you if you’re volunteering to offer yourself up for the cause. Take some of your templar friends along too. At this point, there’s nothing you could do anyway.”

Cassandra blanched and thought back to the maps given to her by the Knight-Captain. She hadn’t the knowledge to truly understand the grand spell sketched out in the city’s streets, but the man’s words rang true.  “Maker. The focus is under the chantry?”

“Indeed,” he gave her a smile that was all teeth. “How else could one explosion cause so much damage? Even then, there was residual magic left in these stones. The Veil is thin in Kirkwall. Thinner still underground.”

As he spoke, he shifted under her boot again, tugging in an attempt to free his arm. Cassandra’s eye was drawn to movement in his free hand. It came up clutching at a sharp stone. Some loose fragment from the rockfall. Cassandra’s sword slid from her sheath as he squeezed his hand about the stone, drawing blood. She snapped a kick at his hand and sent the fragment skittering across the floor. Glistening blood oozed out of the cut, rippling up his arm to sheathe him in a silken layer of armour that was almost black under the glow of Merrill’s magelight. Cassandra’s sword blade slid off the slick surface. The bright line in the bloody layer resealed itself with a wet pop and he rolled away, snapping to his feet just outside of sword range. A blank, featureless face of rippling blood regarded her and raised a hand. A glittering mist rose from the stones. Her breath plumed in the air and her fingers seemed frozen about the hilt of her sword as the temperature plummeted to a glacial cold.

A scatter of rocks whistled over Cassandra’s shoulder. They barely left a dent in the coating that sheathed the blood mage. Merrill had drained herself collapsing the passageway behind them. Cassandra gritted her teeth and dodged out of the way of a rapid flurry of bloody shards of ice that flew her way with a keening whistle. She sidestepped again as a malevolently glittering rune trap blossomed on the passage floor. The armour was not impenetrable. A concentrated attack would damage it faster than it could seal. It lasted only so long as blood kept flowing. If he maintained the assault, he would tire quickly without a blade to replenish the supply.

The blood mage knew his time was limited just as well as she did. He retreated backwards as quickly as Cassandra advanced, throwing up a wall of blood-stained ice laced with an interlocking network of blood magic runes to block her passage. Patchy holes appeared in his unnatural armour. It would have been an acceptable risk had Cassandra been alone. But the glittering wall shattered in a haze of bloody sparks and dirty ice as Merrill threw another flurry of rocks down the passage, leaving her free to advance. She glided forwards as the blood mage scrambled back. Her sword arm whipped up, mist curling around the razor edge of the blade. A precise strike exploited one gaping hole in his armour, lancing up and through his chest. Her sword scraped against bone as she drew it out, twisting viscously.  The replenished flow of blood resealed the armour to leave him a faceless figure sheathed in glistening red, but the severity of the injury left him boneless. The slick armour sluiced off him as he collapsed, coating the filthy floor in a layer of gore.

Cassandra dismissed him from her mind quickly. She would lose no sleep over another dead blood mage. She jogged back to Merrill, giving the pool of blood around the fallen mage a healthy margin, and extended a hand to the wan elf. The elf’s eyes were unfocused with weariness, but she accepted the help with a sigh.

“Past time we left Darktown, Merrill.”

* * *

The maze of passages that made up Darktown played to their advantage. Cassandra couldn’t say whether the track they followed would lead them out, but the chances of finding anyone else were slim the further they climbed, bypassing blood-splattered chambers and growths of lyrium. No mage should have tolerated so much raw lyrium anywhere near them. It didn’t bear contemplating.

There were bodies too, in corners and niches. Pale and blood-spattered. Wide eyes, misted over in death stared back. Sometimes, a malevolent spirit hid behind the empty gazes. Stiff fingers reached towards them as they passed. The odd rattling croak drifted towards them, softened by distance until it was impossible to judge the direction of the source. With the Veil as thin as it was, the scattered bodies were an obvious open invitation for possession, as much as the grand mausoleums of Nevarra.

Every step of the way, the oppressive silence and closeness of Darktown pushed down on her. She had hated the mausoleums, in her days as a young girl. Perhaps it was purely the ghost of the past that meant she felt watched. But that didn’t change the fact that they were doing something down here. Something more than just building an army of the dead. Her mind was drawn inexorably back to a chilling comment in the Band of Three's records. Every body had been drained. There was power in blood. But what possible reason could they have for needing so much? Surely not simply for knowledge. Whatever the reason was, no Seeker could tolerate allowing them to continue.

She was glad when the alternately bloody and mould-streaked passages were replaced with nondescript grimy stone, but it was obvious that Merrill was flagging. Cassandra felt an odd surge of guilt. A blood mage had power to draw upon, but limited to their own blood supply, drawing on that power would weaken them. It was why blood mages inevitably turned to taking blood from others, seeking power where they believed others would pay the sole price. In the privacy of her own thoughts, Cassandra had to acknowledge that her investigation would have been far more difficult without the quiet blood mage’s help. But Cassandra had asked much of Merrill, driving her to draw on her own blood as a source of power. If she had thought to bring lyrium potions, it wouldn’t have been necessary. But instead, she had known and expected that the elf would be required to use blood magic. Expedience in the name of completing her task could only go so far. It was an uncomfortable thought.

The weary elf stopped abruptly as they stumbled off a mine elevator into a spacious hollow. Wide cut-outs in the wall opened out onto a view of the steel-grey cliffs of Kirkwall. The desultory breeze that wafted through the chamber was a blessed relief after the cramped and reeking passages below. After so long in the dark, it was almost a surprise to see actual daylight seeping through. Judging by the quality of light it was early evening. Maker willing, there would still be time to return to the safety of the streets above before curfew.

At first, Cassandra assumed that Merrill had stopped to catch that breath of fresh air and rest a moment. But she stood swaying slightly on her feet, a mournful look on her face. She wiped a sheen of sweat from her forehead, painting her skin in grimy dust and heaved out a sigh.

“Anders had a clinic here, before…” she trailed off and studied the chamber. Aside from the distant hushed murmur of the wind and waves, it was as deathly silent as the rest of Darktown.

“He would have much to answer for, were he still alive,” Cassandra responded harshly.

There were signs that this had once been a thriving area, unlike the confined maze below. Colourful hangings. Makeshift tents. The odd scattered possession covered in two years’ worth of dust. Now it was a graveyard, just like the rest of Darktown. Maker knew what would have happened to the people here. Without help from the City Guard or the Order, they would have been easy prey for any blood mage that came looking.

Merrill gave Cassandra a weary look. “Not Meredith?”

“Need I remind you that having Meredith answer for her decisions was precisely why I was sent to Kirkwall?”

“I know. There are just a lot of memories here.” Merrill exhaled, shoulders rising and falling with the breath. “At least I know where we are now. A lot of passages out around here are blocked, but there’s at least one we can use that doesn’t lead up into Hightown.”

Cassandra dipped her head, holding back on whatever interrogation she might have planned to obtain more information on Anders before the explosion. “Lead the way.”

It was another unpleasant lifetime in cramped underground passages before the found their way to a grubby and winding stairway up into daylight. It was impossible to believe that people could have spent their entire lives living down here, squatting in the dsut and darkness.

The backstreets they wormed through were hardly any better. The odd bloody palm daubed on walls combined with towering buildings and narrows streets made it little more pleasant than Darktown.

Just before they emerged into a comparatively busy thoroughfare, Merrill slumped down against a wall beside her. Ahead of them lay a checkpoint back into Templar-controlled parts of the city. Not the same one they had passed through on the way out, but that hardly made a difference. The Order might not care if anyone decided to leave their protection, but they scrutinised every person entering the region. Not all mages carried gaudy staffs to advertise their abilities, not all those carrying staffs were mages, and no one could recognise a blood mage at a passing glance. If they could, Merrill would have been long dead.

“It will be hard for me to sneak through in daylight,” she informed Cassandra. “You should go ahead without me.”

Cassandra paused. “I would rather not leave you here, Merrill.” The ghost of a smile tweaked at the elf’s lips. “That’s very kind of you, Seeker Pentaghast, but I don’t think I could be very subtle.” She raised her bloody palms as she spoke. “I know a way to get through, but it will be safer after dark.”

Cassandra stroked the hilt of her sword, weighing up the chances of breaking through a templar checkpoint by force. She started and shook her head. Maker knew what Thedas was coming to when she felt inclined to help a blood mage by fighting templars.

“You are certain?” At Merrill’s nod, she grimaced. “So be it. I will find my way to the Hanged Man alone. Maker willing,” she finished in a mutter.

Merrill waved a limp hand in farewell as Cassandra stalked towards the checkpoint. A full squad of perfectly still and perfectly vigilant templars watched the road in either direction. Helmeted heads shifted to watch her as she approached and a polished Knight-Corporal glided forwards, hand twitching towards his sword.

“State your business,” he snapped. His hostile suspicion was a stark contrast to the near-boredom of the templars who had passed them through in the opposite direction.

“I am returning to my lodgings after visiting a friend,” Cassandra replied curtly.

His head tilted, ostentatiously looking her up and down. She didn’t need to see his expression to read his suspicion. “Does this friend live at the bottom of a mine-shaft? Or say, Darktown?”

Cassandra cursed internally as she realised she was still stained with sweat and dust from her time underground. Somehow, she doubted that these templars would believe she had their commanding officer’s approval. Maker knew how long she would be held while they confirmed the claim, if they over bothered to look for confirmation. “I was assisting in construction work,” she hazarded.

“Right,” he replied sarcastically. He indicated off to one side. “Step this way, Serah.”

Cassandra’s jaw clenched but she resisted the temptation to go for her sword. This squad might not be as obviously changed as those she had fought a matter of days ago, but it was foolish to fight so many templars alone.

She raised her hands and stepped to the side, a pair of templars falling into place on either side of her. One conducted a brief but thorough search for concealed weapons. All she had was her coinpurse and her sword. No suspicious notes or suspect weapons to cause trouble, but that didn’t mean she had to appreciate the experience.

Every hair on her body stood on end and a buzzing hum rattled her teeth, a sure sign that the searching templar had attempted to cleanse mana from her. It would take a rare mage who could avoid reacting in some way to the shock of that experience. Evidently they weren’t too concerned with proper procedures. In normal circumstances, even such a cursory test ought to have been conducted in secure surroundings at the very least. But Kirkwall was hardly normal.

“Bare your arms,” the Knight-Corporal ordered when their search came up clear.

Cassandra rolled her eyes and pushed up her sleeves. There were more than a few scars earned in combat, but none of them would be a cause for concern if these templars were adequately trained.

The Knight-Corporal grunted as if disappointed. “Your profession?”

“Mercenary,” she replied.

Another disapproving grunt. “Unfortunately, I can’t hold you just because I don’t like you. You can pass.” Scarlet eyes flashed from behind the shadows of his slit helm. “I would hurry if I were you. Curfew is in an hour.”

“Thank you, Knight-Corporal,” Cassandra replied sardonically. “I will keep that in mind.”

She pushed her way through the checkpoint with the bare minimum of courtesy. Just like the one they had passed through on the way out of templar-controlled districts, it was heavily manned by very cautious and borderline paranoid templars. True to the Knight-Captain’s orders, security was tight. To little effect if people like Merrill and Varric knew ways around. Yet it was still obvious that the Knight-Captain suspected the blood mages were gearing up for something. Equally clear that he hadn’t recognised the severity if his only actions was to reinforce checkpoints. Or perhaps he had. Perhaps that was the only reason she had been allowed to leave the Gallows.

There was no doubt in Cassandra’s mind that waiting for the full might of an Exalted March to be brought to bear on the city was too great a risk. It would take months to gather the necessary resources. Longer still for those resources to make their way to Kirkwall. By the time they arrived, Maker knew what might have happened. She needed an army of Seekers, or Templars. Aside from her own small force of auxiliaries, the closest forces with the appropriate training after Kirkwall were in Starkhaven. Small chance they would be willing to assist after the support they had sent to Kirkwall two years ago had been turned away.

Cassandra’s sudden scowl startled a passing woman to the opposite side of the street with a cough that just barely disguised her intake of breath. There were barely more than a dozen Seeker auxiliaries in Kirkwall, assuming Captain Fabian was able to smuggle them all into the city. That might be adequate against one small coven of blood mages, but this was far far more than they could handle. Which meant she needed to return to the Gallows and convince the Knight-Captain to follow her commands. She would almost rather return to Darktown. For all she knew, the Order in Kirkwall were quite content to protect those regions they held and leave the rest of the city to burn.

By a combination of sheer luck and the apparent infamy of the Hanged Man, Cassandra succeeded in finding Varric’s favoured tavern. The carven figure swinging in gentle creaking circles from a rusted chain above the door made it quite obvious that she had found the right place. Passers-by had been more than willing to point her in the right direction. Quite possibly because she didn’t bother to restrain the irritable snap in her voice as she spoke to them.

She pushed open the door and stalked over to lean against the counter. “I am looking for Master Varric Tethras,” she informed the dubious bartender curtly.

He raised an eyebrow and continued polishing an already spotless glass. “And I’m looking for the Queen of Antiva. We don’t all get what we want.”

“It’s fine, Corff,” a gruff voice yelled from the stair leading to the upper floors. “She’s a friend.”

A few incurious heads turned to study Cassandra briefly as she climbed the stairs, before sliding away to focus back on the drinks in front of them.

“Seeker,” Varric said in a lower tone as Cassnadra joined him. “Remind me not to bet against you. This is the second time you’ve come back alive from somewhere that should have killed you.” He paused and his brows lowered. “Where’s Daisy?” he asked, voice dangerously low.

“She informed me that I should go on ahead,” Cassandra replied, making to slip past the dwarf into the privacy of the rooms beyond.

The dwarf held up a hand to block Cassandra’s path. “So you left her behind? I _knew_ I shouldn’t have trusted you with her.”

“Much as it surprises me to say this, Varric, I am indebted to her,” Cassandra snapped. She matched his glare with one of her own. “But she would have struggled to pass safely through the checkpoint. I had no choice.”

“I hope you’re telling the truth, Seeker,” Varric replied, stepping to one side to allow Cassandra to pass. “For your sake.”

Cassandra slumped into a chair that was set a little too low to be comfortable and rested her head in her hands. Fatigue seemed to be pulling her down to sink through the cushioned seat, but there was no time to stop yet. “Has Captain Fabian returned yet?”

Varric hovered by the room’s entrance, half his attention on the stairway leading down to the subdued common room of the tavern. “I haven’t seen him since you left for Darktown,” he informed her flatly. “Let me guess. Everything is worse than you thought. Again. I could have told you that and saved you the trouble of going down there.”

Cassandra spared a moment to glance up. “Spare me the sarcasm, dwarf. It is not simply worse than I thought. It is quite possible catastrophic. The scale is beyond anything I have seen in all my years as a Seeker.”

Varric studied her and grimaced. “Of course. This is Kirkwall, after all.” He sighed and wandered over to sit opposite her. “So. What do you need from me, Seeker?”

Cassandra traced a whorl on the table beside her, as if it were a microcosm of Kirkwall’s runed streets. “Does the title ‘Conductor’ mean anything to you?”

“I’m not the orchestra type, Seeker.” Varric’s wide grin was strained at the edges. It disappeared quickly when Cassandra failed to respond. “Can’t say it does.”

“And you are quite sure that the only red lyrium you ever saw was in the Deep Roads? Did anyone else visit the site of its discovery after you?”

“What exactly are you getting at, Seeker? I hope you’re not suggesting there’s some link between what’s going on in Darktown and red lyrium.” He shook his head in firm denial. “No. The only red lyrium I ever saw was down there, and no one else could have found it. The only reason we ever did was thanks to my brother.”

Cassandra sighed. “It was too much to hope that the answer might have been in front of me the entire time. There was a templar held captive down there. He was tortured for information. He claimed that the Order is not seen as a true threat to the blood mages, but as a resource.”

“Templars and blood mages don’t exactly mix, Seeker,” Varric replied dubiously, as if she needed reminding.

“No. But a templar has blood like any other living being. Blood strengthened by lyrium.”

“So you’re suggesting what? That they’re _farming_ templars?”

Cassandra’s shrug only barely covered her shiver. “Perhaps. Not actively. But there were many templar bodies down there. They do not fear the Order.”

“So you’ve finally realised that you need to get some backup here then, right?” Varric demanded, leaning back in his chair with folded arms.

“I fear there is no time.”

“Then what?” he growled. A seat that would have been too low for Cassandra framed him like a throne. “Don’t suggest we just let them get on with it.”

“I cannot dare give them time to complete this undertaking of theirs.” Cassandra’s hand drifted unconsciously to the hilt of her sword. “I must request the assistance of the Templar Order in Kirkwall.”

She could not demand their assistance, more’s the pity. It had been made quite obvious that they wouldn’t consider deferring to the authority of a Seeker.

“You can’t be serious!” Varric exclaimed.

“You did not see what I saw, Varric. Darktown is full of the dead,” Cassandra replied wearily. “There is no time to wait for an Exalted March.”

“Why do you think they’d care to help Kirkwall now?” Varric turned away from Cassandra, a haggard look adding years to his face. “Knight-Captain Cullen might be have been more approachable than Meredith once upon a time, but he doesn’t seem too bothered by what’s happened in Kirkwall. He was too much of a coward to even show his face when Hawke was executed.”

“He protested. Meredith subdued him.” Cassandra shrugged. “Or so he claimed. Maker knows if it is the truth. For all we know, he convinced himself that it _is_ the truth.”

“It doesn’t matter either way. He sure hasn’t done anything to help since then. What makes you think you can change his mind?”

“He is a templar, and we need to fight blood magic. Maker willing, we will be able to convince him. And if he cannot be convinced…” Cassandra shrugged. “It is in the Maker’s hands.”

“‘We’?” Varric barked out a harsh laugh. “I’m not setting foot anywhere near the Gallows. I doubt they’d let you back in anyway.”

“Perhaps not,” Cassandra replied, a sudden smile flickering across her face. “But no doubt there is still a watch on the lodgings I used. A simple matter to demand another audience with Knight-Captain Cullen.”

Varric snorted. “You have a death wish, Seeker.” He threw up his hands in surrender. “Don’t let me stop you.”

Cassandra hesitated on the verge of standing, before slumping back down again. “I will wait with you for Merrill’s return before leaving. I would rather avoid crossing a templar patrol after curfew and I owe her my thanks.”

Varric raised an eyebrow. “Can’t say I expected that, Seeker.” He gave her a measuring look. “Corff hasn’t kicked you out of your room yet. Get some rest. It won’t kill you.”

“Do I look that bad?” she replied with a chuckle. She eased herself up from the seat. “Wake me if Merrill or Captain Fabian return.”

He gave her a sarcastic salute. “Whatever you say.”

She wandered into the vacant room in a daze, the muted buzz of conversation from the common room a lullaby in her head. Sleep overtook her almost as soon as she collapsed on the lumpy mattress. Behind her eyelids, the same chaotic fragments of dream played time and time again. Blood. Rivers of sticky gore coating the streets of Kirkwall. Viscous red running along channels in the sewers. Fine streams pulsing with their own scarlet light as they trickled down vast red lyrium growths. Engorged waterfalls of crimson spilling into the hole where the chantry had once stood until the vast pit overflowed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unfortunately my writing rate has slowed right down thanks to RL commitments. I'm still writing, I just can't upload on quite as regular a schedule as I was doing.


	9. Uneasy Allies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassandra turns to the Red Templars for help

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd been doing surprisingly well at keeping to my chapter plan and predicted chapter count, but I decided that the flow would be better if I split up this and the finale. A shortish segment then ended up being long enough for its own chapter anyway.

 

> _Somewhere in that thing was a brother or sister of the Order. But whoever it might have been, they were lost, swallowed by corruption and lies. I must try to remember them as they were._
> 
> _—From the diary of an unnamed templar deserter_

Cassandra had thought the looming mass of the Gallows was threatening at night, as a mass of sharp-edged shadows and balefully gleaming crystal. Daylight wasn’t much of an improvement. In the sunshine, it was easy to see just how colossal the fortress was, even from a ferry halfway across the bay. Buildings in Kirkwall itself were tall, but even the tallest Lowtown tenement was no match for thirty or more levels of crystal-infested fortress. It left her wondering just how nightmarish the interior of the Circle itself must be, two years after its Annulment. Kinloch Hold had reportedly been horrific, and that was a Circle for which the Right had been revoked before it had ever been acted upon. The Gallows hadn’t been as lucky.

Cassandra covertly studied the templar pacing restlessly at the bow of the ferry. Kirkwall had suffered from far more maleficarum and incidences of abominations than any other chapter of the Order, but handling those threats was nothing compared to an Annulment. Even the most devout and obedient Templar might be left scarred. After that, perhaps it was easier to be led into corruption than to question the path they were following. And eventually, the lyrium they took would dull the memory of what their calling had asked of them.

The templar assigned to watch Cassandra’s temporary lodgings certainly didn’t seem to show any of the subtle markers of inner conflict that a Seeker was expected to recognise. He was simply angry, like the rest of the templars in this Maker-forsaken city. He had been less than delighted to see Cassandra strolling up to speak to him. He had been downright livid when she had demanded that he take her to his commanding officer, no doubt expecting punishment for failing to tail her. It had been a guilty pleasure to have his seething presence clear a path for her through Lowtown’s streets.

The ferry captain, on the other hand, was so subdued that it was easy forget that he was even on the boat with them. He was a different man to the one who had returned her to Kirkwall, tall and almost skeletal, where the other had been a greying old man. But they could have been twins for the taut expressions on their faces. The man fussed with the sails and tiller, even though the waters were barely ruffled by a light breeze. He gave his fidgety templar passenger a respectful distance. He kept his back firmly to the Gallows. And he avoided Cassandra as if she was blighted. Considering the size of the ferry, it was an impressive feat.

Cassandra sighed resignedly, loud enough that it carried across to where the ferryman was standing. He fumbled at the knot he was tying and started again. He studiously avoiding glancing over at her, but his shoulders tensed a little more. The way he was acting, he must have thought she was an apostate being brought in for questioning.

They passed into the long shadow cast by the Gallows with jarring abruptness. It wasn’t strictly cold, even out of direct sunlight, but Cassandra shivered suddenly. The templar paused in his pacing long enough to throw an amused smirk her way. The meaning was clear enough. In Kirkwall, he had been one templar facing a Seeker. In the Gallows, he was a part of an elite, albeit small, army.

A pulsating spire of smoke-wreathed lyrium slid past on the side closest to the templar. Flickers of red licked towards him echoing snaps. His attention shot away from her, fixing on the spire with single-minded intensity.

His focus never wavered as they glided across bubbling water towards the short line of jetties. The ferryman finally succeeded in tying the knot. His feet clattered on the deck as he eagerly stalked away to the tiller, conveniently distant from Cassandra. She glanced cautiously over the gunwales. Jagged red outcroppings glittered just beneath the murky surface. Any water craft much larger than this ferry would have been ripped to shreds. If they grew much larger, even a vessel with as shallow a draught as this ferry would struggle. Perhaps if the lyrium was left long enough, a crystalline bridge would stretch all the way from here to Kirkwall. Even if every last renegade templar in Kirkwall were removed, she hadn’t the faintest idea how to get rid of this much lyrium. And given the value of the substance, it might well be impossible to keep people at a safe distance until they understood the risks.

The ferryman might have been obviously uncomfortable with his duty and his passenger, but the ferry slid into position with barely a shudder. Cassandra hopped off with barely a second glance towards her templar escort. On her previous visit, she hadn’t exactly been given the freedom to study the Gallows. But she didn’t intend to waste the opportunity this time. She marched directly towards the wide stairway leading up to the Gallows’ grand entrance. Her escort held just short of scurrying to keep up with her long stride.

The wide stairway up to the Gallows’s main entrance might have looked decorative, but any attacker would have been at a disadvantage before they even reached the gates. Assuming they could even make it off their landing craft when the only room to land was the narrow stretch of island directly ahead of the fortress gates. The wide entryway to the fortress itself stretched up overhead as Cassandra ascended the last few steps, surprisingly clear of the crystalline infestation that leapt out of nearly every other surface. The reason for that was obvious enough. A heavy portcullis in blackened iron peeked out from the top, more than capable of keeping the Gallows secure. Now it was open, protected only by a scatter of vigilant templars. Cassandra couldn’t help but wonder what good even the heaviest portcullis would truly do if blood mages staged a concerted attack against the Gallows. Stone and iron couldn’t hold back someone with the raw power of blood magic at their fingertips, and no templar could silence them. And yet they were still the best she had to prevent whatever plans the blood mages might have.

Her path was stopped just short of entering the Gallows’ main courtyard by a hulking crystalline guard. She was tall enough to look him in the eye, but a heavy mass of lyrium bulked up above him until he seemed far taller.

“I must speak to Knight-Captain Cullen,” she informed him curtly.

Gleaming coal eyes studied her from behind a helm before glancing over her shoulder to the templar trailing behind. He grunted in response to whatever signal the man had passed to him and stepped aside to allow Cassandra into the courtyard.

Reputedly, it had once housed stalls allowing Kirkwall traders to sell to the Gallows’ residents and for the Formari to sell goods to Kirkwallers. Now the whole expanse was overshadowed by huge protruding shards of lyrium. What little sunlight did creep past the long afternoon shadows cast by the fortress was tinted a bloody red by the mass of crystal. The perimeter was almost entirely overrun with a forest of knee-high crystal, and yet the interior was oddly clear, aside from a few low outcroppings.

She continued her march on towards the far end of the courtyard, but something odd about the lone outcroppings in the centre caused her to slow down. At first glance, they didn’t seem any different to the other outcroppings that marred the fortress. Or so it had seemed. On closer observation, the oddly-shaped crystal growths in the courtyard weren’t simply errant shards of lyrium. Each piece preserved a figure within. Fragments of a past battle. The details were blurred, but enough was visible to to put names from Varric’s stories to each figure. Carver Hawke, impaled on his own greatsword, the bright cloth and gleaming steel of his armour blurred to a uniform muddy red through the layer of crystal. Fenris, clutching the hilt of his shattered weapon. The tattoos across his face and arms still pulsed a lurid red, two years after his death. Sebastian, broken fragments of a bow at his side.

And at the centre of the courtyard, a figure sprawled, hands raised in a futile attempt to ward off a killing blow. Cracks mazed across the flagstones around Kirkwall’s former Champion. With the Viscount dead, Hawke had been second in power to Meredith herself. It hadn’t mattered. A sword didn’t care. The courtyard was a permanent monument marking the moment that Kirkwall’s spiralling descent into chaos had become a plummeting fall.

Her escort cleared his throat. “Move along, Seeker,” he called out from behind.

Cassandra rolled her eyes at the impatient order and sped up again. The evidence in the courtyard was a final grim piece to confirm Varric’s story, but that had become irrelevant with the culprit already dead.

She slowed just enough to allow the templar to take the lead again. With an irritated sniff, he stalked past her. They passed into the small courtyard through which Cassandra had tried to make her escape and onwards through the heavily guarded gateway into Templar Hall. For a moment, Cassandra was convinced he intended to spite her by leading her to the office holding Meredith’s mortal remains. Instead, they passed by the sealed room and on to the only entrance with an open door.

It was an oddly normal office all things considered. The Knight-Captain sat behind a desk, working his way through a pile of reports. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been that surprising. The dull administrative tasks of leading a chapter of the Templar Order could hardly stop just because the chapter in question had cut ties with the Chantry. The only sign of the true state of the Gallows was the hulking crystalline templar in the corner. That and the tiny vials filled with glowing red liquid lined up neatly on the desk, as if it were some kind of test of will.

The Knight-Captain glanced up as she stepped into the office. He looked tired, old pain-lines marking his face far more deeply away from his men in the privacy of his office. Even the lambent glow of his eyes seemed dimmer, hardly matching the brightness of the vials on his desk. He frowned slightly, then set down the quill he had been gingerly cradling in needle talons. The worn creases smoothed out and he adopted the unreadable indifference of a veteran Templar officer, concealing the weary man that hid behind.

“Back so soon, Seeker Pentaghast?” He offered her the ghost of a smirk. “You might well be the only person in recent memory to want to return to the Gallows.”

“No games, Knight-Captain Cullen,” Cassandra snapped.

His amusement disappeared. “No games,” he replied coldly. With a curt nod and glare that said there would be consequences, the Knight-Captain dismissed her reluctant escort. The templar gratefully slunk away. “Unless your army is invisible, I‘m quite sure you haven’t managed to get an Exalted March into the city since we last spoke. So. Why are you here?”

There were no chairs in the office apart from the one the Knight-Captain sat in, so Cassandra made do with leaning against his bookshelf. If the move irritated him or his looming bodyguard, it didn’t show.

“A question for you first.” She cocked her head and tried to read him. For now, his icy expression didn’t give away much besides the anger of a commanding officer whose orders had been directly disobeyed. Given time, she could find out anything she wanted, even from a hostile templar like this Knight-Captain. But that wasn’t necessary. Yet.  “If you truly disagreed with Meredith so much, why did you stay in Kirkwall for two years?”

The Knight-Captain’s glare became a touch more fiery. “An odd line of questioning. I don’t see the relevance.”

Cassandra shrugged. “Indulge me, Knight-Captain. Your answer will help me build an understanding of the situation in the city.”

That and help her judge whether he could be trusted not to turn on her. An army led by a man who intended to stab her in the back was no good to her, however well-trained they might be. Assuming the renegade templars could even be convinced to help, of course. A handful of Seeker auxiliaries was even less of an army than one that intended to betray her.

“Fine,” he snapped. “I’ll answer, if only to speed up this conversation. We all need to take lyrium daily to keep the corruption in check.” He raised a hand, crystalline talons consuming the light of the candle on his desk. “This is the product of returning to a full dose after having my lyrium ration withheld completely.”

Veteran templars constructed a fortress of excuses and justifications to hide their addiction from themselves. But in light of that idle comment, the line of vials seemed to have a different significance. Perhaps they were as much a reminder that he had control over his own intake as they were a test of will.

She shook her head. “That is a coward’s excuse, Knight-Captain. If you truly wished to leave Kirkwall behind, you could gather enough.”

“Indeed I could.” The Knight-Captain indicated the looming figure of the templar behind him. “Knight-Templar Corin here will kill me if I try to leave. You must have noticed that he goes everywhere that I go.”

Cassandra raised an eyebrow. “A poor joke, Knight-Captain.”

He let out a sudden amused breath. “It’s no joke, Seeker. Meredith didn’t trust me in the few months before her death, for all her attempts to … control me. She warned me that she had taken precautions.” Another smirk crossed his face. “She had good reason to be paranoid. But even she didn’t expect such a direct attack.”

Cassandra felt a cold rush of disgust. She kept her expression neutral. “Surely you can countermand those orders now that you are in command.”

He shook his head wryly. “Ser Corin was loyal to me, once. But red lyrium changes you. Even chantry lyrium eats away at a templar’s mind over time. You and the rest of the Chantry know it, and yet you feed it to us regardless, Seeker," he scolded her. "Red lyrium is indiscriminate and unpredictable. Unfortunate templars like Ser Corin are little better than golems at this point. He and others like him were told that no one could countermand the order but her.”

“Then kill them before they kill you,” Cassandra replied with feigned lightness. How a commanding officer treated the people under their command — mage or templar — was one of the surest ways to judge their character.

The Knight-Captain held up a hand to stop the brute from moving. “I am not going to kill my own men,” he hissed acidly. “I also don’t appreciate the implication that I might abandon anyone to suffer at the hands of blood mages. Mark my words, Seeker. I will not allow that to happen _ever_ again.”

By this point, she had almost become accustomed to the fickle emotions, so different to the dulled responses of normal templars, but the Knight-Captain’s jump from dry amusement to glacial anger was still jarring. He had seemed restrained compared to many of his subordinates, making it hard to gain a measure of him. But the venomous hatred as he spoke of blood mages was raw and unalloyed. She had her answer. He wasn’t sitting here in the Gallows because he was a coward. Perhaps he would be open to providing assistance, despite his distaste for the Chantry’s influence.

“Then I need your help, Knight-Captain,” she replied calmly.

“ _My_ help?” he snapped. “I already regret what little help I’ve given you. Perhaps I was too optimistic in expecting a Seeker to actually do their duty.”

“You requested an Exalted March.” She waited for his stiff nod before continuing. “I do not believe you can risk waiting. You and your templars have sat in relative safety for too long. If you continue to do so, I do not believe there will be a city left for you to hold.”

He chewed her statements over for a moment, crystalline talons rapping an irregular beat on the desk.

“What did you discover?” he replied finally.

Cassandra grimaced and refolded her arms. “There are hundreds of corpses down there, Knight-Captain.” She paused for a moment, considering whether to tell him everything she had discovered. She had the distinct feeling that he might not react well to the idea that red lyrium might be more of a liability than an asset. “They have a leader,” she continued, choosing her words carefully. “Someone who may have plans far greater than simply summoning a few demons.”

The Knight-Captain’s expression tightened and a fist clenched, drawing furrows in the scarred surface of his desk. “That is … concerning. If it’s true. But can you be trusted?” he asked dubiously. “Kirkwall has had problems with blood magic for at least ten years. It seems rather convenient that a crisis should emerge so soon after your arrival.”

“You trusted me enough to release me against your better judgement. I do not believe you are a fickle man.” Cassandra strode forwards and planted her hands on his desk, leaning close enough to feel the haze of unnatural lyrium heat that wreathed him. Rather than drawing back, he returned her glare with a forbidding one of his own. “Remember what the Order stands for. Kirkwall needs its templars, Knight-Captain.”

He studied Cassandra for a long moment, scorching coal eyes meeting her natural ones. The faintest deepening of the worn creases around his eyes and brow suggested her words had hit home. He dipped his head in a curt nod. “Then we cannot allow these supposed ‘plans’ to continue. But the Order is not yours to command.” He stood abruptly from his seat and stalked over to a long wooden case set against a wall. “If you intend to betray us…”

He trailed off and snapped open a series of catches along the case’s length. Cassandra felt a sudden pressure against her ears, the now familiar non-sound of red lyrium. When the Knight-Captain turned back to her, his hand was wrapped around the hilt of a broad greatsword that narrowed to an almost needle-like point at the tip. It was hard to tell the material beneath a layer of charred ash that coated its entire length, but it seemed doubtful that the almost organic lines could belong to any metal. The blackened weapon was an indelicate, crude item. Where Cassandra’s own sword was an efficient tool for dealing death, honed and improved over hundreds of years, this was a far simpler weapon. It looked no less deadly for that fact. To someone with enough strength, it would be far more dangerous than Cassandra’s own faithful longsword.

“If you intend to betray us,” he repeated. “I will kill you.”

He made the statement with incongruous lightness, but she had no doubt that he meant every word.

“I have as much reason to suspect betrayal as you, Knight-Captain,” she responded brusquely.

He smirked briefly. “So you do.” A crystal talon tapped the blade, drawing out a discordant note that echoed a little too long to be entirely natural. “I tried to destroy this weapon after I killed Meredith,” he told her idly. “It was the source of our corruption. But perhaps it can do some good now.”

Cassandra studied the weapon, lip curling. Aside from the solid coating of ash, it matched the description that Varric had given of Knight-Commander Meredith’s mysterious lyrium blade, forged from the fragments of a lyrium idol found in a distant corner of the Deep Roads. They all would have been far better off if he had succeeded in destroying it. The red lyrium it held had played no insignificant part in Kirkwall’s current state. She rather doubted much good could come of such a weapon, even for one with the best intentions.

“As you say,” she replied flatly.

He curled one hand around the crudely wrapped hilt and hefted the blade with worrying ease. A sudden atonal hum split the air. Cassandra winced, but was hardly surprised to see the rapt attention of the Knight-Captain’s hulking bodyguard. A wave of bloody carmine pulsed down the length of the blade and a shimmer rippled in the air above the weapon. Flecks of charred ash sheeted away to reveal a pristine bone-white blade riddled with a delicate tracery of lyrium veins. Every templar received a lyrium-steel blade, but never infused with raw lyrium like this. It seemed almost alive. And dangerous.

For the briefest moment — so quickly that Cassandra was almost convinced she had imagined it — a predatory smile crossed the Knight-Captain’s face. The bloody light and unpleasant hum cut out as quickly as it had arrived. He allowed the weapon to drop, settling his hands on the pommel. Cassandra cautiously recalculated her chances in single combat. Even the most elite templar would struggle to face multiple opponents alone, and yet Knight-Commander Meredith had killed the Champion of Kirkwall and three other veteran warriors with this blade. Maker knew what a raw lyrium blade could be made to do in a templar’s hands.

 “You have your army, Seeker Pentaghast,” he told her coolly, gleaming eyes banked back to a sullen glow after the brief flare of lyrium. “Where would you have us go?”

Cassandra cast a brief glance up and behind her. Hightown overlooked them all from its distant perch on the cliffs. The Order might not have as much secrecy as they thought. “The chantry.”

He barked out a humourless laugh laced with the painfully crystalline sharpness of lyrium. “The chantry,” he breathed, gaze focused somewhere in the past. “Of course. The Maker has quite the sense of humour.”

* * *

The sky was shading the hazy burnt orange of a Kirkwall sunset by the time Cassandra returned from the Gallows. The Knight-Captain had challenged her plan of attack at every turn, making it abundantly clear that his assistance was grudging at best. That many of his suggestions were reasonable didn’t soothe her irritation at his uncooperative attitude. Competent officers were useful when they worked with her, not against her. But she had stood firm on one point. Tomorrow, they would march on Hightown. Tonight, there were safeguards to put in place.

The track she had taken through the city had passed by more than a few abandoned corners of the city to dodge any suspicion in case the Knight-Captain had set a more competent tail on her. Much as she had feared, every single grand city-scale rune was marked in the centre by a smaller rune of equally chilling complexity. She had destroyed what she could. But the chances were high that it was far too late to make much of a difference. Destroying the rune whilst it was fresh might be enough to disrupt the magic before it could come into effect. Those she had visited were the clotted and reeking remnants of blood magic spells weeks or months old. Still active, and still casting their foul influence over the city. The best they could hope was to weaken the effect, but whatever they had done was too far gone to cleanse entirely. The coppery bitterness left in the air after each rune was laboriously cleansed and destroyed proved that suspicion.

Many of the Knight-Captain’s men had also been set the thankless task of clearing what they could before the attack. It was something they had been attempting for years, but now they made a far more concerted effort to scour every area of the city under their control. Any further, and they risked drawing unwanted attention. Cassandra’s true task wasn’t a gruelling job that could be left to the common Knights-Templar. She lurked in the shade of between two spindly tenements in a remote corner of Lowtown, nose wrinkled against the lingering stench of a spell that she had done her best to cleanse. A familiar figure emerged from around the corner and made his way over to her. He kept a cloak about his shoulders, despite the lingering warmth of the day. Brief flashes of gleaming metal showed themselves from underneath. A brief smile crossed Cassandra’s face. Captain Fabian had managed to fulfil at least part of her orders.

“Over here, Captain,” she called out quietly.

He gave a short wave and sloped towards her, one hand keeping his cloak closed. “Lady Seeker,” he replied. “Glad I don’t have to stage a rescue.”

Cassandra rolled her eyes. “There was no reason for concern.” She sighed in response to his raised eyebrow. “I can handle myself,” she amended. “Your men are prepared?”

“They are. Prepared and in place as of an hour ago, with a little help from the dwarf. You didn’t give me much time,” he grumbled.

“You have been set harder tasks than a simple infiltration,” she said sternly.

“True,” he replied with a shrug. “And I don’t blame you for taking precautions around these templars.”

“They have fallen far,” she sighed. “But we must remember them for what they once were, even if they do not”

Fabian nodded morosely. He was silent for a few moments before a mischievous grin wreathed his face. “Your blood mage friend says she’s doing what she can to clear runes the templars have missed. I never thought I’d see the day that a Seeker called a blood mage an ally.”

“She is not an ally,” Cassandra snapped irritably. “Simply… useful.”

“Right,” he replied dubiously. Fabian exhaled and leaned against the wall opposite Cassandra. He looked almost as tired as she felt. It had been a long few days for the both of them. “Tomorrow, then?”

Cassandra nodded slowly and looked up at the towering mass of cliff face just visible in the gaps in between buildings. This whole mess seemed far worse than a few demons and dead bodies. Maker knew what they would find in the ruins of the chantry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My named templars are pulled from my DAII fic. Knight-Lieutenant Rost was one, Ser Corin is another. I see this fic as a non-canon ending to my previous canon-compliant story, if the last few chapters had turned out differently.


	10. The Well of All Souls - Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marching on Hightown

> _We've found a chamber where the Veil is at its thinnest, long-since looted, but the power is still there. Tonight we will go there. Pray for us. Pray for us all._
> 
> — _Hidden behind a rock with curious markings and signed, "The Band of Three"_

 

The Templar Order was an army. Without any borders or land to protect, it wasn’t one in the conventional sense. The Chantry would deny it whilst relying on them as its armoured fist anywhere from the smallest village chapel to the Circles to the Grand Cathedral in Val Royeaux itself.

And yet despite the years of training, despite the weapons and armour, the average citizen might not see it. A layer of duty and faith masked the sharpest edges from the public eye. Even most Templars might not see themselves that way, taught as they were that their duty was as peacekeepers and defenders of the faithful. But they were the ones called on to protect against magic and — where it was deemed necessary — to unflinchingly put those dangers to the blade. And when an Exalted March was called, Templars formed the hardened core of warriors.

Their unquestioning obedience had been taken as a given for years. After an arrangement that had lasted for Ages, there was hardly any reason to even imagine anything else. What happened when even a small part of that army realised that it _was_ an army? And not simply an army, but one ordained in the Maker’s service, told the weight of the Maker himself was behind them?

Kirkwall, apparently. The people of Kirkwall certainly knew what the Templar Order was. A Templar Knight-Commander — albeit a dead one — held the title of Viscount and their rule of Kirkwall was an occupation in all but name. The Order in Kirkwall could have fielded hundreds of veteran warriors to hold the borders to which they laid claim, but they hadn’t, retaining the façade of fulfilling the duty Templars had always fulfilled. Peacekeepers. Defenders against the dangers of magic. Even the people of Kirkwall only saw brief glimpses of the sharper layer usually reserved for the most dangerous maleficarum.

Watching templar after templar disembark from ferries out of the Gallows fortress, it was impossible to see them as anything other than an army. All the activity of a busy port had fallen to a stunned halt as countless ranks of templar steel mustered along a vast cleared section of the public docks. There had to be only a bare skeleton force left behind to protect their stronghold.

They didn’t bother to hide what they had allowed themselves to become either. It was chilling to see just how many templars were being overtaken by growths of lyrium. For every outwardly normal templar, there was another who bore crystalline spurs or hulked under outcroppings that sprouted from their shoulders and bulked them out to monstrous proportions. In the bright light of day, it was hard to say whether polished metal armour or scarlet crystal was brighter. There was a part of Cassandra that wanted to call them a horde, but discipline was too rigidly enforced for that to be fitting.

Varric nodded towards the senior officers overseeing the disembarkation. The Knight-Captain himself stood just a little removed from his Knight-Lieutenant subordinates, watching the mobilisation. A small crowd of corrupt templar waited just beyond them, a mass of glittering crystal spines, sharp steel, and baleful stares marking them as what the Knight-Captain had called Knight-Commander Meredith’s shock troops. Even in the heavily controlled docks, the senior officers had bodyguards close to hand. Knight-Captain Cullen might not like her, but he had taken her warnings to heart.

“You sure you can trust him, Seeker?” Varric asked with a dubious frown. He idly reached up a hand to check his crossbow. “Or any of them for that matter? These people are dangerous, Seeker.”

“I do not,” Cassandra replied with a brief shrug. “But I trust that their Knight-Captain hates blood mages more than he hates the Chantry. I will use the tools the Maker provides.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

Cassandra glanced down at the dwarf. Concern had worn a deep frown into his features and bowed his shoulders. He had been invaluable over her short time in Kirkwall, but he had asked much of him. She could never forgive herself if she got him killed now, after how much he had risked himself to help his city.

“You and Merrill must stay well away,” she warned him. “Is that understood, Varric?”

Varric barked out an incredulous laugh. “You think I’m going to leave you without backup, Seeker? Not a chance.”

Cassandra shook her head. “You both have done more than enough, Varric. I cannot ask you to risk your lives.”

“I did say you had a death wish, seeker,” he growled, hefting his crossbow into a more comfortable position.

Cassandra pushed his crossbow back down. “Please, Varric.”

He resisted for a moment, but something in her expression had to have convinced him of her sincerity. He raised a hand in surrender. “Whatever you say, Seeker. I’ll save a drink for you at the Hanged Man. Corff always has something nice stashed behind the bar.” He hesitated and his crossbow drooped. “You’re not going to have many friends down there. Don’t—”

“I will not get myself killed,” Cassandra replied, cutting him off before he could finish.

“Right.”

He sighed unhappily and raised a hand in a brief farewell before slouching off into the depths of the back street. When Cassandra was quite sure he had disappeared behind the corner of a warehouse, she rolled her shoulders and stepped out onto the public docks. She was spotted almost immediately. At a gesture from the Knight-Captain, a familiar officer detached himself from the entourage and swept up to her. Knight-Lieutenant Rost’s wan skin looked even more unhealthy in sunlight than it had at night, veins standing out in stark contrast to the ashen colour. He gave her a smile that was all teeth and tapped a hand over his heart in a salute that was almost polite. Almost.

“Kind of you to join us, Seeker.”

Given how many people were gathered on the docks, it was almost silent as Cassandra followed him to the Knight-Captain. Discipline meant that the only way she could tell she was being watched by the templars they passed was by the movement of glowing eyes.

The Knight-Captain forced passed on a final flurry of orders to his subordinates as she approached. When he was done, there was a rattle of perfectly precise salutes. They fanned out to place themselves at the head of each contingent of templars, leaving her alone with the Knight-Captain and the baleful glare of the barely-human bodyguards shadowing him. He stalked to meet her and gave her a minute nod of acknowledgement.

Cassandra was disappointed but hardly surprised to see the long bone-white grip of Meredith’s greatsword protruding over his shoulder. She would rather he had left it behind. It was an unpleasant weapon made more so by its legacy and the corruption it bore.

“You will be joining myself, Knight-Lieutenant Conrad and the First Kirkwall Platoon in heading to the Chantry itself,” he informed her curtly. “The rest will take other routes into Darktown.”

Where he could keep an eye on her, was the unspoken addition. Cassandra’s return nod was calculated to the exact same degree as his. She had expected no other decision from him. Neither of them trusted the other, but they didn’t need trust to work together. A common enemy had united many over the Ages.

“Good. Are your templars prepared?”

He gave her a smirk in answer. He was briefly limned in red light and pulse of deadened air washed over her. He stalked past her to stand at the head of his army.

“Templars!” he called out. If the wave of pressure hadn’t drawn their attention, the angry buzz of his voice certainly did. Rank after rank of helms hiding glittering red eyes focused ahead. The minute sounds of movements died away to leave an attentive silence. “We march on the ruins of the chantry to do our duty and cleanse this city of blood magic once again. We will pay with our lives should the Maker require it of us.”

He stepped away as the metallic rattle of salutes echoed across the docks. His voice dropped to a barely audible volume, words almost lost behind the hum of red lyrium. A rustling whisper carried across in the wake of the dying sound of salutes, echoing his quiet prayer.

“ ‘I shall not fear the legion, should they set themselves against me’,” she finished for him. He nodded a thanks that actually seemed genuine. He looked tired now that she was standing this close, eyes deeply shadowed despite their unnatural gleam. “Not the rousing speech I was expecting,” she commented.

He barked out a harsh laugh. “This is what you expect of us isn’t it, Seeker Pentaghast? Trained from childhood to be unquestioning, unfeeling tools wielded as the Chantry sees fit. By the Divine’s own Hand, no less.” He waved a gauntleted hand to take in himself and the templars arrayed in front of him. “We are what you made us.”

Cassandra shook her head in a regretful dissent. “You did this to yourselves, Knight-Captain.”

His expression morphed into something flatly unreadable in response. “Perhaps.”

“The sooner we move, the sooner you will be rid of me” she informed him flatly. And the sooner she could leave this cursed city behind. After Kirkwall, she would never again object to being given a routine assignment. “Order your men to march.”

“As you command, Seeker,” he replied sarcastically. He extracted a tiny vial of glowing red from a pocket and tipped it into his mouth, draining every drop. His eyes closed in a brief flash of ecstasy and he exhaled out a shaking breath. He met her eyes with an impassive stare, no evidence of even a hint of shame at her disgusted observation. “Move out!” he barked.

Without any fanfare, they began to march away from the docks and up the main thoroughfares into Lowtown. The crowds of curious dockworkers and gawking traders backed a safe distance away as templars filed passed them at something approaching the speed of a forced march. It was certainly an army, and one eager for a fight. With troops like this, it was no surprise that there hadn’t been any need for a grand rallying speech.

The markets clustering close to the docklands trade were bustling as they passed through the cordons, but would-be customers cleared with incredible sped within moments of hearing the mixed metal and crystal rattle of marching templars. By the time they had fully entered Lowtown, the only observers were merchants unwilling to leave. She hardly blamed them for their panicked and wide-eyed stares as they stood frozen behind their stalls.

“You realise that your subjects do not trust you, Knight-Captain?” Cassandra commented to the Knight-Captain. “Or is it Viscount?”

He cast an indifferent look at her in response to the goading comment. “They were Meredith’s subjects. I never claimed the title of Viscount.”

“Not officially, no,” she replied with a disapproving grunt. “But I note that the city has no properly elected representative, even now that you have murdered its Viscountess. You cannot hide behind a dead woman forever. You might not have named yourself Viscount, but you have made no attempt to relinquish control of the city.”

She had purposefully kept her voice at a volume that could easily have been heard by any attentive listener, but he didn’t seem especially bothered.

“With good reason.” He inclined his head to indicate the apprehensive faces watching from doorways and side streets as they climbed onwards through winding thoroughfares. “The last time we mobilised in such numbers was to retake the city from blood mages and abominations after Hawke’s apostate ally destroyed the chantry. The time before that, to retake the city from the Qunari. I lost count of the number of times over the years since my arrival that we had to handle magical incidents in Kirkwall.” He ran a taloned hand delicately through his hair and shook his head in disgust. “I might not have approved of invoking the Right of Annulment, but the Circle was so far gone that the First Enchanter himself was a blood mage, despite all of his protests to the contrary. Meredith wasn’t wrong to recognise that this city needs saving from itself.”

Cassandra gave a humourless chuckle. “An impressive speech. I imagine it helps you sleep comfortably at night.”

“I sleep very little these days,” he countered. “But I have a clear conscience when it comes to keeping this city safe. Hence why I was willing to help you, despite who and what you represent.”

They marched a little further in silence whilst Cassandra considered her next words. She watched Kirkwall citizens scurry out of the way of their column with a slight grimace. The unlucky few who couldn’t find a side street had to press themselves into doorways or against walls to give way. Lowtown’s main thoroughfares were wide enough for the general bustle of a city, but they hadn’t been designed to accommodate troops. What the maze of streets _had_ been designed for was something she wasn’t especially eager to discover.

“You have a chance at redemption here, Knight-Captain,” she insisted. “After we have dealt with whatever is happening in Hightown, the Divine will listen to your grievances. Perhaps we can even assist in limiting the harm done by this red lyrium of yours. But only if you submit yourselves to the Chantry’s oversight once more.”

He gave a crystalline laugh, gleaming eyes sparking as he glanced over at her. “No.”

Cassandra blinked in surprise at the brief answer. “Is that all you have to say?” she asked incredulously.

“You’ve made your case. I’ve already made mine. You’re offering a return to slavery, not redemption.”

“At least consider the offer. I cannot believe you truly want to wage a war.”

He shrugged. “If you insist. My answer will not change.”

Cassandra’s shoulders slumped. She had hoped he might see reason, that his agreeing to cooperate might mean he was at least willing to listen. For all her threats, even the Chantry didn’t have the political influence to effectively conquer a city, even if they could somehow find available resources to do so. She could only pray that the Maker would somehow see fit to change the Knight-Captain’s mind

* * *

Far too quickly, their march had taken them out of the crowded and lively streets of occupied Lowtown and into the crumbling silence of those districts the Order had ceded. There were still people out there. There wasn’t room for an entire city’s worth of people to live in the districts the Order held and it could be hard to leave a home that might have been in a family for generations. Others preferred not to live beneath the Templar Order’s eye, whatever protection they might offer from the dangers in Darktown or Hightown. Lines of drying sheets between a few buildings had proof of that. There had beent the odd flash of movement in distant streets or the occasional quickly-muffled sound of voices, but it could easily have been completely and utterly deserted. The few people living there didn’t intend to risk being sighted by Templar forces. Too much chance of being taken as a blood mage suspect, Cassandra had contemplated darkly.

There were only so many routes from Lowtown into the rarefied air of lofty Hightown. There were more than enough through Darktown. Every Hightown manor had cellars connecting to that twisted network. The Knight-Captain had sent many of his templars through those routes to cover as much of Darktown as they were able. But the grand stairway they had climbed up the cliffs had to be the most striking. Hundreds of stairs had been painstakingly carved into the sheer side of the cliffs during the city’s height as a Tevinter colony.

Now Lowtown was spread out beneath them in a carpet of pale sandstone. The nobility of the city had enjoyed their very literal elevated position over the common people. Right until the chantry had exploded.

Hightown was a surreal study in contrasts. One side of the street down which they were marching boasted a perfectly pristine row of grand edifices bristling with towers and boasting a brutal elegance.

The other was a confusion of masonry, half subsided into the ground beneath. Bitter legacy of the destruction of the city’s chantry. There was the odd wall still standing, or a forlorn piece of abandoned furniture standing unharmed in the wreckage. Aside from that, it was a flattened mess. It didn’t take much imagination to recognise that the same would be the case across Hightown. Perhaps with time they might have rebuilt, but evidently no one had cared enough to try.

Clearly though people still lived here. No. _Had_ still lived here. Cassandra shook her head in confusion, scanning the streets around them for any sign of life.

There was absolutely no one in sight. People had lived here when templars still occupied the entire city. Varric had said he had contacts in Hightown. There was obviously still communication and trade between Lowtown and Hightown, even if it wasn’t officially condoned by the Order. She had even seen a few Hightown residents captured by templars a matter of days ago. There should have been people. Servants. Nobles. Merchants. _Someone._

Instead, it was eerily, deathly, unnaturally silent. Not the silence of Darktown or the vast mausoleums in Nevarra either, with the unseen presence of the spirits drawn there by the vast weight of untold deaths. This was just ... empty.

Hightown had a population numbering in the thousands. A mere fraction of Lowtown, but that many people didn’t simple disappear. Cassandra raised a hand to the back of her neck as her skin prickled. There was something very wrong here.

She exchanged a brief look with the Knight-Captain. He looked as confused as she felt. The air deadened further as he drew on his templar abilities to silence any possible magic in the area. The effect amplified further as templar after templar behind them followed suit. It would have minimal effect against a blood mage or demon, but it was oddly comforting, despite how the humming non-sound that set her teeth on edge. Even an abomination wouldn’t be able to kill this many templars at once.

“Do you sense anything?” she asked him. There was something about the atmosphere that made her wince to hear her voice echoing back at them.

“The Veil is thin here. Apart from that…” he shrugged tightly. His hand twitched abortively as if he had wanted to draw his blade. She felt the same urge. “Nothing.”

“Nothing,” she confirmed darkly. “We should investigate the buildings for any suggestion of what happened.”

“Agreed.” He drew to a halt and glanced over his shoulder. “Spread out!” he ordered. “Search the houses. I want any living creature, human, elf, or dwarf, brought to me immediately! Kill anything else that moves.”

Cassandra followed her own suggestion, making her way over to a lofty home that had to have belonged to a wealthy merchant or noble. She tested the handle and found it unlocked. Even more surprising, given Kirkwall’s reputation for rampant criminal activity.

A handful of templars strode in behind her as she entered, spreading out across an unlit entrance hall overlooked by a grand balcony. Their faint lyrium glow provided enough light to make out details. Possessions still in place, including some valuables that would have been easily transportable. The occupants hadn’t fled the city. She ran a hand over the sweeping bannister as one of the templars stalked past her to check the upper floors. No dust. The home had been occupied until quite recently.

Every room was much the same. There were signs of recent occupancy, but nothing to give any clue as to where those occupants had gone. There was no blood or sign of a struggle. No possessions removed as if the occupants had intended to flee. Whoever had lived here had been quite content where they were. Which led to a rather chilling conclusion to Cassandra’s mind.

She returned to the main entrance hall and rejoined the Knight-Captain as his templars reported in to him. A Knight-Templar more serrated crystal than metal was last to report in.

"Empty, Knight-Captain,” she informed him.

An edge of pent-up anger colouring her buzzing crystalline voice. She shifted restlessly as she waited for further orders. They had prepared for pitched battle, not whatever mystery this was. Despite all the training and razor-sharp steel they boasted, there was nothing any of them could do to combat a city full of abandoned mansions and empty streets.

The Knight-Captain accepted the report with a curt nod and caught Cassandra’s eye. “Precisely. Nothing. No sign of a disturbance. No evidence that they were attempting to flee.” He frowned grimly. “Meaning—”

“Meaning whoever lived here left willingly,” she completed for him. Given who and what occupied Hightown, they both knew precisely what that meant. “Blood magic. They were compelled to leave without a fight. Perhaps even compelled to live out their lives without attempting to flee.”

He nodded once, a brief look of disgust deepening the worn lines on his face before smoothing back out again to studied neutrality. “It would appear your concerns were well founded.”

Cassandra absorbed that concession with a grimace. “I would rather have been wrong.”

“Quite,” he replied with a hollow smirk.

She cast one final glance over her shoulder as she began to leave the oppressive silence of the mansion. “I doubt there is anything else to find.”

“Here, Knight-Captain,” a voice called from outside.

The Knight-Captain raised an eyebrow. “Or perhaps there is,” he commented to her.

They strode back out onto the street and followed a gesturing Knight-Lieutenant Conrad into a home at the very end of the street. Even before they entered, Cassandra knew what they would find. An thicknes blanketed the air around the house in a oppressive atmosphere. A bloodied hand painted on the door in the flaking rusty brown of dried blood only made it more obvious.

The entrance hall was rank with the stench of old blood, so thick it was almost tangible. All the shutters were thrown wide open, casting unpleasantly bright light across the scene. Stray splatters spiralled around the room in sweeping arcs, drawing the eye inexorably towards a complex blood rune painted across the floor tiles. She might have called its sheer complexity beautiful if she hadn’t known its source. A few bubbles popped lazily on the surface as she studied it. Even with the light streaming in through the high windows, the rune glowed with a faint rosy light of its own.

“I will see the stars and know your Light remains,” the Knight-Captain whispered in a strained voice from behind her.

The dull thud of a burst of cleansing energy from him did little more than rock Cassandra on her feet and throw up loose possessions. The rune had been here too long.

“Far too late to do anything about a rune this well established,” she said.

An internal instinct had her unfold the map the Knight-Captain had given her. He leaned over and tapped a spot, leaving a small puncture in the thin parchment with the tip of a gleaming lyrium needle.

“Here,” he told her grimly.

Cassandra traced the swirling line of streets. “The focal point of another grand rune. Maker,” she exhaled. “You are sure you have no knowledge of what they might represent?”

“None,” he replied curtly. “The blood mages we captured were rather … resistant to questioning.”

Cassandra tossed a disapproving glance at him. She hated to imagine how one might ‘question’ a mage who drew power from their own spilt blood. Torture was almost entirely worthless at the best of times when it came to extracting valuable information.

“I imagine they were.” She spent a moment tracking their path onwards before folding the map back into a pocket. “There is little use in searching any further. We must move on to the chantry.”

The rest of Hightown’s streets told the same tale. Those mansions that hadn’t collapsed stood empty. They marched to the echoing sound of armoured footsteps from stones walls and under the blankly staring eyes of empty windows. There wasn’t even the scattered detritus and waste of a deserted city, like she had seen in the abandoned districts down in Lowtown. The streets were clean, those houses still standing were well maintained. It made the odd bloodied palm marking a door and the accompanying stench of decay and copper all the more jarring.

The houses grew a little bigger and taller as they drew closer to the site of the chantry, the streets a little wider, with well-tended greenery providing some relief to the uniform sandstone of the buildings. The towers of the Viscount’s Keep, one whole, the other a broken stump, clawed at the sky off to their left.

Cassandra kept expecting to encounter something the further they marched. This was as good as enemy territory. Even the most incompetent opponent ought to recognise how easy it would be to lay an ambush in these twisting streets. The Knight-Captain certainly recognised that danger. His head swivelled to watch every single intersection, side street and cul-de-sac even more than hers did. The low throb of the templars denial of magic had gone on so long that she could almost ignore it.

The archways leading to the courtyard that had once held Kirkwall’s chantry were understated given that it had once been a major cathedral, home to a Grand Cleric, a representative of the Divine in the Free Marches. Templars streamed in ahead of them, weapons drawn in readiness for the enemy they had all been expecting throughout the tense march. Cassandra and the Knight-Captain followed on, surrounded by a restless entourage of bristling lyrium monstrosities.

Their anticipation was proven unnecessary once again. The courtyard was as empty as the rest of Hightown. A set of stairs that might once have been grand cut off with abruptly half-way up its length. The space where the chantry would once have stood was a gaping sore just beyond that truncated flight. Greying scraps of banner that might once have been bright Chantry red fluttered forlornly and a few statues of Hessarian in dust-streaked bronze leaned out drunkenly over the rubble-strewn expanse, where they hadn’t been toppled entirely.

A long pennant stood at the very borders of the chantry pit, pristine white with a bloody palm in lurid red. The exact inverse of the Chantry’s heraldry. The fragments of a cast bronze Chantry sunburst were piled at the foot. Combined with the background itch of blood magic — faded but still scarring the Veil — at the back of her mind, the symbolism couldn’t have been more blatant if they had left behind a blood-spattered altar. It was as good as a taunt. Cassandra felt an almost physical twinge of pain to see a chantry so obviously desecrated.

Cassandra strode up the broken flight of stairs, gingerly picking her way around huge chunks of masonry to peer down the pit. She swayed unsteadily as a sudden dizzying spell of vertigo nearly stole her breath away.

“Merciful Maker,” Cassandra gasped, instinctively retreating back a few steps away from the vertiginous drop and resting a hand on the stripped remains of a dead tree for support. “The explosion did this?”

She had expected a hole dug out by the explosion, but the pit plummeted hundreds or thousands of spans straight down. Jagged stone walls pierced with the occasional signs of Darktown’s complex network of underground passages were visible closer to the surface, but after that, it was nothing but impenetrable blackness. There had been rumours that the furthest depths of Darktown intersected with the highest parts of the Deep Roads. Looking down here, she could believe it.

The Knight-Captain took a few cautious steps closer to peer down the hole. “Not this, no,” he breathed, prudently moving back as an errant blast of wind whipped at his robes. He glanced around the shattered courtyard as if it held some answer. It would have taken years to dig something like this by mundane means. By magical means, it could well have taken far less time. “The apostate levelled the chantry. But I saw the aftermath myself when we retook the city. It was nothing like this.”

“Here lies the abyss, the well of all souls,” Cassandra quoted under her breath.

“There is nothing of the Maker in this, Seeker,” he snapped. “There is a passage leading down into Darktown just below. This way.”

Cassandra dared another glance down the pit before following the Knight-Captain. It might have just been her imagination, but there were tiny sparks of faint light somewhere down there, like a night sky half hidden by mist. Tiny red sparks, like elemental fire castings. Or blood magic. Or red lyrium.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year to those of you reading.
> 
> Benefits of the quiet holiday season meant this chapter turned into a bit of a monster. Part 2 should be up over the weekend.


	11. The Well of All Souls - Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The descent through Darktown.

> _I foreswear my oaths. The magister's lore must be burned and the ashes scattered. No good can come of it. And Maker help us if someone does answer what we could not._   
>  _—Hidden near curious markings and signed, "The Band of Three"_

Only a few steps into Darktown and it was easy to forget that they had entered through the most exclusive districts of Hightown. An area located near the chantry and the Viscounts’ Keep itself, no less. They might be far above Lowtown, but even here there were the same miserable passages and stairwells — if a little less dank — with the same general feel of oppressiveness.

There was far too much area to cover in one group, and none of them could be quite sure which directions would lead them deeper towards the pit underneath the chantry. With a few barked orders, their contingent was split up into its constituent squads. They filed away down the maze of subterranean corridors, echoing footsteps gradually fading into the distance.

The passageway seemed far emptier now with only a single squad of templars behind her. Still, by all accounts, templars in Kirkwall had spent a disproportionate amount of their time hunting blood mages and demons across the city. There were certainly worse reinforcements to call on.

They descended cautiously down a passage that seemed to alternate between gentle slopes and stairs with treads so narrow it was little better than climbing a ladder. This high above sea level, the walls of the passages were dry and crumbling. Even so, she became gradually aware of a faint trace of rot mixed in with the light film of dust that tickled the back of her throat. Not mixed with acrid copper of blood magic. This was simply the familiar unpleasant reminder of recent death.

The dull sound of their footsteps changed tone slightly as they approached the end of passage. Their torchlight carried far enough beyond the rough wooden frame of a doorway to suggest it opened out into a wider chamber.

Cassandra gestured for a sudden halt as a faint sparkle on the floor caught her eye. She gestured with the point of her sword. “Misdirection hex.”

The Knight-Captain smiled slightly. “They want to keep unwelcome visitors out, or in,” he suggested quietly.

Cassandra nodded her agreement and tugged on the ability granted by Seeker training. It was a far subtler dispel than the raw power that red lyrium had repeatedly demonstrated, but it was just as effective at this scale. There was a faint sputtering crackle and the rune dissolved in a bright shower of sparks.

Cassandra eased her shield into a more comfortable position on her arm and resumed her advance in step with the Knight-Captain. She was glad he seemed to have set aside his hostility when it mattered. Were it not for the blatantly obvious physical signs and the hazy red gleam of his eyes as he glanced around them, it would have almost been enough to forget what he represented and see him as a loyal templar ally.

They passage opened out into low-ceilinged chamber that stretched off into hazy gloom barely lit by their torches. Templars fanned out in line, shifting restlessly, hunting for a threat like hounds on a trail. The smell of rot was stronger in here, a foulness that only reinforced the stifling deadness of the Darktown passages.

There was a ragged line of corpses against the wall. Some slumped as if they had been kneeling, begging for their lives. Others crumpled as if they had been resigned to their fates. Most could barely have been dead more than a day. Nobles. Servants. Even someone in what looked like the dress of a city guard of some type.

“Maker. The residents of Hightown?” Cassandra asked.

“So it would seem,” the Knight-Captain replied with a curl of his lip. “The bodies should be burned. We’re fortunate they haven’t been possessed yet.”

Cassandra gestured to the air around them as if the paper-thin Veil could be seen. It certainly didn’t help her general feeling of disquiet. “I imagine possession was precisely the intention,” she replied darkly. “Why so many? Why now? These people would have been alive only yesterday.”

A foul gust of wind cut off whatever theory the Knight-Captain might have intended to offer. Every torch flickered and sputtered out with a wet hiss. Without that light it was utterly black, a foetid darkness so thick it was almost tangible.

“Relight that,” the Knight-Captain snapped from somewhere to Cassandra’s right.

There was an echoing howl from somewhere in the murky depths of the chamber, a creaking, rattling sound that tried to evoke all the most primal terrors. It seemed to have come from right behind her almost as much as it had the distant corners.

Cassandra settled into a fighting stance and and clenched her jaw. The darkness was a cheap trick, an attempt to make them easy prey for a terror demon.

She stiffened as the Knight-Captain actually laughed, the amused sound drowning out the lingering echo. She saw a brief flare of glowing scarlet eyes as he looked past her. In the pitch blackness, his skin did nothing to hide the corrupt lyrium flowing through his veins and permeating his flesh. The faint glow pulsed in time with the measured rate of a heart beat. He could have been a demon himself.

Cassandra found herself shuddering involuntarily. The demons were better, a far simpler enemy. Those bright stares and that crystalline laugh were far more chilling than a demon’s howl. She had faced countless demons. But that laugh was edged with madness, far more dangerous for how well it was kept hidden.

Every templar around her was the same. In some places, a hazy gleam showed see where lyrium threatened to burst through their skin entirely. In the most corrupt, anything human about them was completely lost to the darkness and sullen glow of crystal.

“Terror?” the Knight-Captain called out derisively. “I’ve faced far worse.”

The buzzing hum of a silence rose up to either side of her as torches were relit. Warm pools of light flickered up, masking the unnatural glow of her supposed allies.

The timing couldn’t have been better. The first demon leapt out of the floor almost directly in front of Cassandra as if it were as a pool of water. The bubbling green rippling from the stone was just enough warning for her to get her sword and shield in position as it launched itself at her. In the wavering light, all she could see of it was a cadaverously thin body, claws long enough to rival her sword and a deformed head with far too many eyes. She caught the terror demon’s barbed tail with an upwards slash of her sword as it whipped towards her. It howled at her as the keen edge of her blade severed its tail.

Somewhere off ahead of her, there was a deafening crack and blinding burst of crimson light produced by a red lyrium-powered smite. Whoever or whatever the target had been, there was an animal yelp. A blast of air shoved the demon in the back. It stumbled towards Cassandra. She pressed the advantage the unknown templar had given her, stabbing up towards the demon’s abdomen. It leapt away from her to land on all fours, stub tail lashing at the air, and sank into the stone in a ripple of green.

Cassandra didn’t need to look to know where it would emerge next. A terror demon was a weaker variety of spirit, but almost always deadly against the untrained. For someone with experience combating magical creatures…

She turned on her heel and launched herself forwards. Her slashing blade neatly severed the re-emerging demon’s head from its shoulders in a shower of sticky black ichor. For someone with experience, a terror demon was a predictable foe.

She caught quick glimpses of other fighting their own opponents as she hunted for the next demon. Magic flared weakly in each direction she looked, damped in potency by the templars.

It wasn’t only terror demons they had stumbled upon. With the element of surprise gone, other varieties had made an appearance too. A few rage demons focused incandescent beams of fire at a templar. One diverted the flames away, allowing his partner to rip it to shreds with lyrium claws. Cassandra dashed forwards to finish off a skulking sloth demon before it caught an unaware templar in the back. She caught a glimpse of the Knight-Captain split another terror demon clean in half with a sweep of Meredith’s greatsword. As she watched, more demons fell to lyrium and steel blades.

There were angry shouts from somewhere in the distance. Cassandra cursed internally. The summoners had kept enough connection to their bound demons to sense when they were sent screaming back to the Fade.

She caught the coppery sense of blood magic somewhere off to her left moments before a trio of blood mages sprinted into the chamber. Those few templars that weren’t engaged with banishing the final few demons rushed to fall into line with Cassandra.

A storm of raw spirit energy crackled in the air ahead of the mages, racing forwards in an impenetrable wall of blazing lilac. Fuelled by blood, it was entirely undamped by the silence humming around the templars.

Cassandra took cover behind her shield. It washed over her with a hissing roar. The skin on her legs prickled as the wave of energy leaked through her light leathers. She sent up a brief prayer of thanks for magical resistance.

There was a rapid succession of deafening cracks and flares of red light. One mage was thrown back with a pained yell. There was a crunch as he slammed into the chamber wall behind him. She saw flesh begin to warp and bubble as the shock opened the mage’s mind wide to the demons teeming just out of sight beyond the Veil. She saw a crystalline templar monstrosity flow in a dangerous blur across the chamber. Blood showered the wall in a gory spatter as lyrium claws viciously ripped the abomination near in two before it could emerge.

There was no time to curse the foolishness of leaving that much blood exposed in the presence of a blood mage. The second fell to one knee with a pained yelp, dagger clattering to the floor beside him and — in that brief dazed loss of focus — was coldly executed by Cassandra.

A bloody red shield swathing the final mage sparked once and then shattered in the wake of the onslaught. Metal flashed in the torchlight. Ribbons of blood leapt into the air around her, drawn from beneath the blood mage’s skin and her fallen companions. With a howl, a barrage of bloody streamers erupted from her. Crackling ice blossomed in clouds around her. Jagged shards of ice raced towards them even faster than the storm of blood. A templar was throw back with a crystalline grunt, frost blooming across his armour. Cassandra whipped her shield around to block a thick splinter that would have ripped through her gut. It shattered against the metal surface and threw her back a pace.

One taloned hand darted out and blocked the whipping end of a bloody streamer that had been making for Cassandra’s exposed head. The glistening surface boiled and began to dissolve as it came into contact with the exposed lyrium at the hand’s fingertips. The entire length collapsed, leaving a bloody trail across the floor. The Knight-Captain acknowledged Cassandra’s barked thanks with a grim nod.

The templar beside Cassandra was less lucky. A ribbon caught him about the legs and whipped him up into the air. He impacted the ceiling with a painful thud. Then another caught him, wrapping about his neck. He shuddered uncontrollably and let loose piercing keen of agony. The blood oozing from seams between pieces of armour shot into the air to join the bloated streamers orbiting the surviving blood mage.

The humming non-sound of red lyrium rose to a fully audible pitch that was almost a scream. There was a brilliant flare of red light followed by a moment of deafening silence. Then an unnatural howl. Cassandra almost lost her footing entirely as she was shoved back by a solid wall of crackling force. It raced out in every direction, visible as a faint red glow in the air, with the Knight-Captain at its epicentre. She was forced to one knee and hissed as red sparks skittered across her skin, leaving a trail of excruciating fire in their wake.

The blood mage took it far worse. For all that she was drawing on blood rather than the Fade to fuel her spells, she was still a mage, vulnerable to a templar’s abilities. Whatever red lyrium-fuelled power the Knight-Captain had called on crippled her. She screamed in agony and dropped to her hands and knees, gasping for breath. The bloody streamers shuddered unsteadily and splashed to the ground around her in gory puddles. The broken templar corpse landed on the floor beside Cassandra with a thud.

The Knight-Captain was the only one still standing straight after the blast. Even his templars had been left unsteady. He slid forward with inhuman grace, glowing greatsword levelled at chest height. With a smooth sweep he decapitated the mage and kicked the toppling corpse away from him with the toe of his boot.

“Only gatekeepers. Not the ringleaders,” he pronounced coldly as the head rolled in one direction and the body slumped in another. He flicked his blade once to remove the blood and stalked over to check on the fallen templar. He shook his head as he stood again. “Dead.”

“Dangerous gatekeepers,” Cassandra grunted. She levered herself back up and gingerly brushed herself off. Maker knew what that wall of force had been. A grossly overpowered version of a cleanse, perhaps, brutally severing a mage’s connection to the Fade. “And gatekeepers for what? Corpses do not need protection. We must press on.”

She looked around the chamber. There was the passage from which the blood mages had arrived, but there was no guarantee that took them closer to the chantry pit. There were other doorways too, and a stairway that led up. Nothing taking them further downwards. Nothing that looked much like an obvious major route. Her sense of direction had been almost entirely ruined by the confusing maze of passages.

Cassandra cocked her head suddenly and gestured for quiet. In the distance, she could hear a hiss like steam escaping a kettle. A rage demon. More than one, likely. That was as good an option as any.

She and the Knight-Captain focused on the same direction within seconds of each other. “This way” she called out as she strode over to duck through a low doorway into the passage beyond.

The distant sounds grew louder as they advanced. But then, just as another doorway came into view, the sound cut off with an abrupt rattle. Cassandra frowned. That sounded like someone had killed the demon.

She allowed the templars to take the lead through the doorway as they broke through into a cavern so large that their torchlight couldn’t make out more than the vaguest hints of narrow stalactites above. The echo of their footsteps had died off almost entirely. There was even a faint breeze whistling from the inky blackness at the far end.

She spotted a brief flash of fiery orange from a far wall and drew to a sharp halt. The bright flare of a dying rage demon had reflected briefly from the polished templar armour, unmistakable against the black background of stone.

“Is that your Knight-Lieutenant?” she asked the Knight-Captain with unabashed surprise.

As she watched, she could pick out more templars emerging through the scatter of passage entrances piercing the cavern walls. She shook her head in disbelief. The chances of them arriving in the same location at the same time, even somewhere as large as this, seemed unbelievable small.

“It would seem so,” he answered flatly.

A few barked orders carried over the dead air of the cavern. The Knight-Lieutenant and a handful of Knights-Corporal jogged over to join them. Gleaming red eyes all held matching confusion, despite the crisp salutes.

“We neutralised a number of blood mages, Ser,” the Knight-Lieutenant reported. “But collapsed passages forced us in this direction.”

“I do not trust this,” Cassandra commented darkly.

“No,” the Knight-Captain agreed grimly. He inclined his head to the far end of the cavern, lost in shadows. “But that breeze implies we’ve found open air. That would suggest we’ve returned to the pit.”

The breeze strengthened further as they picked their way over to the opposite end of the cavern. Cassandra bit back a curse as her foot caught on a rough ditch in the cavern floor. Keeping a steady footing had been difficult enough in the passages, thanks to all the collapses. It was even more difficult over this uneven surface with nothing but torchlight to guide them.

She jerked to an abrupt stop a mere second later, foot poised over open air. The cavern floor dropped off into utter blackness just beyond, a sheer drop so neatly sliced that it could have been done with the edge of a blade. They would have needed something far brighter than a handful of torches to see anything beyond that razor sharp edge.

Cassandra cautiously set her foot down on solid ground and peered up. There was a pale circle of daylight far far above. This was certainly the pit where the chantry had been, but she hadn’t realised just how far they had descended. The passages must have sloped down so gradually as to be almost unnoticeable.

She glanced down as a breeze ruffled her hair and whistled past her ears. The arid brush of air had come from below, not the distant glimpse of open air above.

The hole could have been as shallow as the length of the cavern or it could have been miles deep. But it wasn’t the seeming bottomless depth of the hole that drove a sudden shiver down her spine. There was no mistaking the red sparks now. There was red lyrium down there. It had infested the walls with a profusion of crystal spines. From a distance it almost looked like the reversed image of a tree’s roots, climbing the walls up to the distant circle of sunlight. And yet even that dim glow wasn’t enough to judge just how far down the pit plummeted.

“Knight-Captain,” she called out. “You must see this.”

“Impossible,” the Knight-Captain gasped as he joined her. “How in the Maker’s name could there be red lyrium down here? We’re half a city away from the Gallows.”

It made no sense. Raw lyrium was deadly to a mage. There could be no reason for the blood mages down here to welcome so much of it so close to them. They couldn’t touch it, certainly couldn’t process it into anything they could use.

Cassandra shook her head slightly to correct herself. _Mages_ couldn’t touch it. A tranquil or a non-mage could have done, even if it eventually overtook them like the poor souls she had seen in the Gallows’ cells.

There was another more troubling mystery. Had red lyrium always been down here? That seemed the only reasonable explanation, but someone would have discovered it long ago if that really had been the case. Even after having seen it in the Gallows, everyone knew that lyrium was only found in the Deep Roads. It wasn’t alive. It didn’t grow. There were more questions than answers down here.

A sudden feeling to the air stiffened Cassandra’s spine. There was a soft ripping sound that she felt more than heard, tell-tale indicator of a blood mage pulling a spirit through from the Fade. The Veil was so thin here that it couldn’t have taken much more than the blood spilt by a pinprick wound.

Then a few more in quick succession. Ten. Twenty. Until she lost count. Beyond that, the low groan of possessed corpses and the copper tang of blood magic.

She drew her sword. The sharp ring of steel from templars all around them couldn’t mask a deep derisive rumble of laughter. The ground under her feet shivered with heavy footsteps. An actinic glow sparked from the far end of the cavern, illuminating a hulking great shape topped with corkscrewing horns.

“Pride demon!” the Knight-Captain called out to his templars. His head darted between the rough holes piercing the cavern walls, calculating. “Spread out by squads. Defensive stance.”

There was another rumble of laughter as the pride demon ducked through into the cavern, head nearly scraping the cavern’s ceiling. A lash of pure lightning sparked into life in its hand and licked at the air. A pack of rage demons — smaller but no less dangerous — clustered around its feet.

Cassandra spotted a hunched crowd of despair demons block another passage, masking the robed figures of blood mages. A mix of possessed corpses and sloth demons in another, once again with a few blood mages behind them. The same in every other passage.

“Merciful Maker,” Cassandra murmured. “We were lured here.”

She ran her own rapid calculations. There had to be close to one hundred templars gathered together now that they had regrouped. The odds were still in their favour, if not quite as much as Cassandra would have liked.

She readied herself as they advanced. They couldn’t let themselves be driven back into the endless drop behind them. This would be a hard fight.

The demons advanced just as quickly, hemming them in at every side. And stopped, just beyond the reach of all but the most skilled templar’s lyrium-fuelled abilities. Cassandra hesitated too, scanning the shifting mass of demons and blood mages. Who could command so many so easily?

It seemed her question was to be answered. A small channel opened up between the hunched ranks. A figure swept through with all the arrogance of a king marching past his loyal subjects. He surveyed the gathered templars with a sneer.

The figure was obviously male, but beyond that, any resemblance to anything human, elf, or dwarf ended entirely. Even from this distance, it was obvious that his cadaverous form towered almost twice the height of a man, closer to the height of the looming pride demon than the disconcertingly subservient blood mages gathered behind him. The withered skin of his chest was a tattered mess, merging with tarnished planes of what looked like a breastplate until it was hard to say where flesh ended and metal began.

Cassandra blinked as she tried to understand what she was seeing. Red lyrium crystal glittered on the thing’s head. Not growing out of flesh as it did from the templars around her. It seemed to have been fused with his flesh, skin stretched and twisted over sharp facets of broken crystal and fragments of metal like some obscene parody of a helm.

Blood mage? Abomination? He was obviously neither of those. Certainly not with raw lyrium fused with its flesh. He - or it - looked more like a darkspawn, but there was no such thing as an intelligent darkspawn, let alone one that could lead an army of blood mages and demons.

She might have been stunned into inaction, but the templars held no such uncertainty. They advanced in lockstep towards the frozen ranks of demons hemming them in.

The creature raised a clawed hand towards them. “Stop,” he commanded.

Cassandra gasped in renewed shock as every templar staggered to an immediate halt. Whatever he had done wasn’t blood magic. There was no sense of anything magical aside from the massed horde. But they had been incapacitated them just as effectively.

She heard some of those closest to her hum a few discordant notes that leaked out between groans of pain. The Knight-Captain raised a hand to his head, greatsword drooping from one hand. He was whispering something from behind gritted teeth.

The creature’s eyes snapped to Cassandra, the only person still standing straight. His lip curled in a sneer. “You are no templar,” he pronounced coldly. “No matter. You will serve me nonetheless.”

Cassandra stepped around the frozen figures of templars until she could see the creature directly through ranks that seemed no protection at all now that they had been immobilised. “Serve you? I do not know what manner of creature you are, but I would never serve,” she barked.

“You are brave, given your predicament.” The tattered remains of robe skirts trailed in the dust behind the creature as he drew closer. He grabbed a nearby templar. The man’s breastplate crumpled beneath the creature’s grip. “Tell me who she is.”

“Seeker. Of. Truth,” the templar murmured without any resistance or hesitation.

The creature laughed derisively and dropped the templar in a heap at his feet. Oddly human eyes looked over at Cassandra again. It seemed wrong to see such a human gaze from something so unnatural.

“You are no mage,” he sneered with a dismissive wave of one clawed hand. “You could no more find truth than these naive fools.”

Cassandra could hear faint movements behind her. The Knight-Captain whispers were almost loud enough to hear now. It sounded like he was pleading for something to get out of his head. If she could keep the creature talking long enough, perhaps he and others could shake whatever had taken hold of them.

“You are the one known as the Conductor then?”

The creature gave her an ugly smile. “So I have been named. It is a poor translation of a name with far deeper significance.” He began to stalk towards the abyss behind them, grabbing another templar as he passed by Cassandra. “I was told many tales of the supposedly fearsome Templar Order. It speaks ill of the mages of this time that they should fear such pitiful opponents.”

“What have you done to them?” Cassandra demanded. “This is no form of blood magic I have ever seen.”

“Red lyrium is a powerful tool to those with ability and knowledge to understand its potential. Its song is mine to control as I see fit.” He sneered down at the frozen ranks of templars. “Every drop these templars drank simply tied them more tightly to me. Their blood binds them as slaves to my will now. Any minor interferences were a small price to pay when they so willingly allowed themselves to be chained.”

There was sudden gasping inhalation from the Knight-Captain. He slumped to one knee, sword slipping from his hand with a ringing clatter as he shuddered uncontrollably.

“What?” he whispered breathlessly. That one word was full of enough appalled disbelief and horror for a lifetime. He shook his head in desperate denial. “No. No. My mind is mine, demon.”

“I am no demon, to be easily slain or bound in service,” he snapped derisively. “You show admirable willpower, templar. I might have enjoyed making you serve me,” the creature said with a hint of approval. He drew a wickedly curved knife and held it aloft. “But your protests are meaningless. Watch as your followers are slaughtered like vermin.”

The templar didn’t even whimper as the blade was drawn across his throat. A thick wash of blood bubbled over his steel breastplate and sheeted down to the floor with an audible patter. The same channel on which Cassandra had lost her footing gathered the flow as it grew from a trickle into a stream, washing over the edge into the abyss beyond. The Conductor tossed the limp body over the edge and watched it fall with a contemptuous bark of laughter.

Cassandra darted over to the shuddering Knight-Captain and hauled him to his feet, wincing as fiery heat bled through her leathers.

“Now is not the time to falter,” she told him in an insistent whisper.

She shot a quick look over to the Conductor as she spoke. He still had his back turned on them, but that wouldn’t last for much longer.

He shoved her away with a look of unadulterated disgust as soon as he had his feet back under him. “Get away from me,” he snapped icily.

The power behind the push almost had her lose her footing again. She bit back an angry demand for an explanation. Whatever reason he might have for his sudden anger at her, it seemed to have been enough for him to regain full control of himself. He swept Meredith’s greatsword up from the floor just as the Conductor turned back on them.

“Enjoy your defiance whilst you are able, templar,” he told the Knight-Captain scornfully. He raised his voice to ring through the cavern in an angry rumble. “Kill them all. The final hour approaches. Their blood will open the path.”

A crackling hum washed over them as a sense of magic nothing like Cassandra had ever felt before vibrated through the air. Fleeting tongues of scarlet energy played about his skin. There was a bright flare of light. Cassandra blinked, eyes watering in pain.

When she opened her eyes again, the Conductor was gone. The demons certainly weren’t. There was a cacophony of shrieks and roars, undercut by the low rumbling laugh of the pride demon.

She turned in a quick circle, looking for someone still standing. They had been more than a match for the horde when every templar had been standing. With only her and the Knight-Captain in any shape to fight, it was an entirely different prospect. A few seemed to be fighting off whatever had a hold on their minds, but far too few to make a difference.

She narrowly dodged a blazing flurry of fireballs as she pulled a nearby Knight-Corporal to his feet. She drew his sword for him and shoved it into his hand. Hazy red eyes seemed to clear as his fingers closed about the hilt. Impossible odds, but they had to try.

“Wake the rest of your men if you can!” she called out to the Knight-Captain as she drew her own sword.

“Hold off the demons,” he commanded over his shoulder as he stalked past her. His scarlet glare was all blazing hatred. “If the Maker is feeling generous, you might even survive.”

A familiar grating non-sound rose up as Meredith’s blade flared to life. There were sporadic flickers of movement from the still ranks. The siren song of raw lyrium called out to them. She prayed it could overcome whatever control the Conductor had exerted over them through their corrupted blood.

It would work or it wouldn’t. She didn’t have time to watch. Didn’t have time to guess what the Knight-Captain was thinking either.

“Maker guide my blade,” she prayed under her breath as she wove between hunched and fallen templars to engage the first shrieking demons.

Terror demons were the fastest, leaping in and out of view as they danced between reality and the Fade in flickers of green. Cassandra dodged and weaved with them, caught the ripping claws of one on her shield, killed another with a blade through its skeletal chest. Others loomed behind. A pack of shades. Hissing rage demon. Hunched despair. Focus on the closest targets.

The despair demon fell, beam of ice sputtering out with an angry hiss. A blood mage died with a scream. A shade’s claw tore a gash in the leathers of her upper arm, a hair’s breadth from ripping through flesh. She had barely made a dent.

There was a glimpse of shining steel and bright robes shooting off to one side with incredible speed. A blood mage collapsed with a sword blade through his heart. Another templar flowed past to take place at Cassandra’s other side. The whip crack and flash of a smite echoed. Cassandra allowed herself a brief sigh of relief. There was hope yet. Templars were shaking the control over them.

The green ripple of an emerging terror demon drew her attention back to the boiling threat ahead of her. The clotted roar of an abomination sounded from somewhere in the mass. She adjusted her stance and slashed.

Her world reduced to the shining length of steel in her hand and the enemies beyond. She glided from demon to shade to possessed corpse in a welter of ichor. A blast of force magic bowled her over. She rolled to her feet, cut the legs out from under the mage and finished him with a blade through the heart. The crackling end of the pride demon’s lash nearly caught her more times than she could count. Flares of magic or templar abilities, flashing steel, glowing eyes, inhuman shrieks that could have come from either side. It was a battle of demons against monstrosities.

For every demons she or others caught, others slipped past. There were fallen templar bodies everywhere. Rivulets of blood from slashed throats soaked into the channels carved in the cavern floor. The copper and rot stench of blood magic was thick enough to cut with a blade. The angry hum of red lyrium was a brutal counterpoint to every demon’s shriek. She was covered in countless cuts and bruises. Her cheek burned where she had been caught with a blood magic spell.

Breathe in. And out. Focus.

At some point, they managed to bring down the pride demon, slicing at its legs until what passed for its tendons were severed. The Knight-Captain himself executed the crouched demon with a sword through one of its eyes and a pulse of lyrium that shattered its skull.

An abomination wiped out a swathe of recovered templars with a sheeting stream of boiling flame and savage lightning. Cassandra came at it from behind, shoved a blade through its tumorous back. The keen edge caught on warped bone, leaving her with only the edge of her shield against a possessed corpse. A tug on the sword hilt and it came free. The corpse crumpled, skull split down the middle.

And then there was nothing more in front of her. Cassandra’s breath burned in her chest and scraped at her throat. She was abruptly became aware of every ache and pain, but she found herself suddenly able to pause. The cavern was almost quiet now, after the deafening cacophony of shrieks and screams. The pride demon’s corpse was a slowly dissolving lump of dark scaly hide on the cavern floor just ahead of her. Templars they couldn’t afford to lose had died in the effort. But she was still alive. Somehow.

Cassandra scanned the cavern, counting the losses and remaining numbers. She winced. There couldn’t have been more than a fifth of their original numbers left. Most templars had never shaken the control over their minds. They had died without a fight.

She narrowly avoided a bloody channel in the cavern floor. The viscous substance gleamed faintly as it flowed down a gentle slope into the abyss beyond. The templar’s lyrium-tainted blood was feeding … something. An urgent situtation had become a catastrophic one. She offered a bitter prayer to the Maker. Too late to go back. Far too late. She had been an arrogant fool bringing these templars here. Nothing good came of corruption

With a resigned sigh, she limped over to the body of a fallen blood mage and wiped the blade of her sword clean of blood and ichor. Sticky residue still coated her leathers, but it was better than nothing. Maker willing, the other contingents sent into Darktown by different routes would have had more luck than they had. It was surely impossible to believe that traps had been laid for them all.

She looked wearily about for somewhere to sit and rest, just for a moment. Right now, even the scaled body of the pride demon looked like a tempting place to stop. There was a promising looking rocky protrusion in the floor at the edge of the cavern. She began to shuffle over. It was better than nothing.

There was a sudden bright red flare. Cassandra leapt back with a bark of surprise as flames hued an unnaturally bright crimson crackled across her path, cutting her off. Sharp-edged shadows leapt across the walls around her.

She snapped about, looking for the source. Had the Conductor returned?

The Knight-Captain stood at the epicentre of silent lines of crimson fire, standing tall as though they hadn’t just fought a desperate battle for survival. His bright stare was coldly inhuman and utterly without remorse.

Every living templar stood at his back with blades bared, blood-soaked and with crimson reflections masking the Sword of Mercy on their breastplates until they looked a solid red. Every pair of those scarlet eyes held looks of vicious anticipation.

“What is the meaning of this?”

“I need answers, Seeker.” He stalked a few steps closer to her. Each movement was backed with restless, dangerous energy. “You betrayed us. You lied.”

“Explain yourself,” she barked.

“Don’t act the fool,” he snapped at her, more despairing than angry. He shook his head incredulously and ran a hand through his hair, seemingly uncaring when the sharp point of a needle talon caught his skin and drew a fine line of blood across an ashen cheek. He inspected the offending limb with a look of sickened disgust. “You knew this corruption - this _pollution_ was further tainted by blood magic and you said _nothing,_ ”

Cassandra’s hand drifted to the sword at her hip. She cautiously tested aching muscles as a renewed surge of adrenaline washed away fatigue fogging her mind. His carefully cultivated mask of control was cracking. Far too many templars became paranoid after years of lyrium use. But this could turn dangerous.

“I knew nothing of the sort, Knight-Captain,” she assured him in the most conciliatory tone of voice she could manage. “You must believe me.”

“Do not lie,” he snarled. The point of his sword tapped an irregular beat on the floor in front of him, each one drawing a discordant crystal chime from the bone-white blade. “You knew that thing’s name. Perhaps you knew what it would do to us. Perhaps you simply wanted it to do your job for you and rid Kirkwall of the Templar Order.”

“Do not be ridiculous. How could you even imagine a Seeker of Truth might do anything that might help a blood mage?” she snapped. Even the suggestion that she might have had something to do with the massacre was enough to have her forget her attempt at appeasement. She stabbed a finger at the corpses littering the ground, at the channels of blood trickling over into the abyss beyond. “Look at this, Knight-Captain. Remember the duty you agreed to fulfil. We must stop whatever is happening down there. There is no time for this paranoia. ”

“Maker have Mercy on us all for the arrogance of Seekers,” he laughed bitterly. The sharp crystalline brittleness of madness was far closer to the surface. “We are to be used and discarded once again. That will always be my - our - fate.”

“Whatever our differences, we have a common goal, Knight-Captain.” She darted a quick glance around the cavern in search of a gap in the flames. “Or have you forgotten that?”

“I have not,” he replied flatly. The tapping blade stopped. Cassandra untensed ever so slightly. “Ser Conrad. Take your men and find this so-called Conductor. Disrupt whatever spell needed so much templar blood.” His lip curled with disgust. “Kill him.”

Most of the templars swept away, passing through the leaping crimson fire as if it weren’t there. Only the Knight-Captain and his surviving bodyguards remained.

“And you, Seeker,” he continued with venomous precision. “We don’t need you or your lies. We will protect this city ourselves. There will be no more Chantry interference in Kirkwall until the Exalted March comes to cleanse this cesspit of a city.”

He levelled his greatsword at her. His expression turned perfectly empty as the humming weapon hovered unwaveringly over her heart. Cassandra froze, barely daring to breathe. Any brief sense of cooperation they might have shared had been seared away as if it had never existed.

“The Maker will judge you for you actions,” he intoned, the angry buzz of lyrium and unrefined hate echoing behind each word. “Blessed are they who stand before the corrupt and the wicked and do not falter.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which things go (even more) wrong. Also in which I get to bring in a certain melodramatic villain who's (once again) only a secondary antagonist, because I find red templars more interesting.


	12. An Ending

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassandra's story in Kirkwall reaches a conclusion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've discovered that actually ending a story is quite a challenge. I could have kept editing and tweaking this chapter forever, but I really just wanted to get it out. I do hope it manages to be a suitable end.

 

> _By blood and lyrium were they drawn_  
>  _Inexorably to the Unreachable City,_  
>  _The heart of all creation._
> 
> — _Canticle of Silence 2:3-2:4, dissonant verses_

 

At times like this, Cassandra prayed for an arrogant man. An arrogant man would have wanted to prove his superiority, to prove he was better than a Seeker. He would have ranted, given her time to prepare. He would have fought her alone.

Knight-Captain Cullen was not an arrogant man.

Cassandra threw herself backwards as the glowing blade flicked up towards her throat, so close that it was by the grace of the Maker alone that it didn’t carve a new scar on her face. In the wake of the blade’s painful whine, she heard crystalline shouts as his bodyguards rushed towards her. One streaked towards her in a low blur, the other rushed in high, far too quick for someone - something - so burdened by unnatural growths. They were blurs of crystal and metal that reflected the leaping crimson flames.

Her sword cleared its sheath with barely enough time to block the first attack. The metal shuddered as she caught the vicious blow of a crystalline spur jutting from his elbow. Knight-Templar Brinn bared his teeth in a familiar savage smile as he drove Cassandra towards the bulk of the brute approaching from the other side. Knight-Templar Corin. It was a familiar scenario, and just as desperate as the first time. But if she could kill them, perhaps the Knight-Captain might be willing to see reason.

She disengaged, ducking away to retreat as far as she could. She needed a wall at her back. Somewhere to cut off avenues of attack.

There was nowhere to go. Crimson flames cut her off from the passages lining the cavern walls. In the opposite direction, the abyss yawned, impossibly wide and impossibly deep.

The templars had seemed immune to the flames. It would have to be the pit.

She skidded to a halt as another line of virulent fire seared its way across her path, cutting of her retreat to the edge of the abyss. Her foot caught on a templar corpse as she stumbled away from the scorching heat. That moment of clumsiness saved her. The Knight-Captain darted forwards impossibly quickly, glowing blade carving through the air where her heart would have been had she not slipped.

He reacted with ferocious speed, halting the sweep of the greatsword in mid air and redirecting it towards her. It would have split her in two if it had hit. She fended off a blistering assault, every overpowered blow sapping the strength in her arms and carving jagged notches in the edge of her blade or shield. There were no gaps long enough to allow for any meaningful counter-attack. All she could do was defend. If he had been normal? Uncorrupted? Perhaps he would have been slow enough with such an unwieldy weapon to given her a chance.

“Give up, Seeker,” he hissed as the notched edge of her blade caught his, temporarily halting his attack.

Cassandra gritted her teeth as she desperately attempted to pit her human strength against the unnatural force of red lyrium. The buzzing whine of the blade inches from her scattered her thoughts in a haze of pain and confusion. Any kind of response was out of the question.

She heard a distinct crack, felt a sharp stab of pain as the Knight-Captain jabbed a steel-clad elbow into her ribs. The impact forced their weapons apart and threw her to the floor. Her breath left her in a painful rush. Over the Knight-Captain’s shoulder, his bodyguards stalked closer, curving in from either side to cut off any hope of further retreat.

She rolled away from the Knight-Captain, then rolled again as Brinn’s sword stabbed down. It impacted the stone floor beside her. What she wouldn’t have given for the Knight-Captain to be an arrogant man.

Cassandra slashed at Brinn’s legs, praying she had judged the angle right. He stumbled as her blade sliced through the cloth of his robe skirts, biting into the vanishingly small gap between greaves and cuisses. He growled as his knee buckled, torn cloth tangling his legs.

She leapt to her feet, dodging another precise slash of the Knight-Captain’s greatsword more by instinct than anything else, and rammed her blade forwards. Not subtle, but effective. Brinn toppled sideways, blood leaking from between his fingers as he clutched at the jagged tear in his throat.

The brutal background hum of lyrium rose to a roar. She was blown off her feet by a blast of raw force. She caught flashes of crumpled corpses, the rugged stone floor. Flickering flames licked at her skin as the shock wave tossed her through a wall of fire. She landed heavily, breath leaving her in a rush. She caught a glimpse of her shield as it was sent spinning into the depths of the abyss only inches away from her. Sticky blood from a sluggish rivulet coated her hand as she pushed herself to her feet. Thank the Maker she still had her sword.

Crimson fire wreathed the Knight-Captain as he stepped through the flames. Virulent lightning discharges arced from his greatsword and flickered across his armour with snapping retorts. His scarlet glare now was one of utter loathing.

Cassandra raised her sword in a two-handed grip, muscles screaming in protest. It was paltry protection against a greatsword.

There was a muffled crunch, then another. The Knight-Captain’s head snapped around. Cassandra dared to look beyond the flames. Ser Corin crumpled to join the other dead scattered across the cavern. Past him… Cassandra breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Captain Fabian and his men, in their stolen templar armour. The precautionary measure she had hoped she wouldn’t need.

Her relief withered slightly as she spotted an equally familiar pair of figures amongst her disguised reinforcements. One smaller and squatter, one lithe, almost fading into the background.

“Maker, Varric,” she whispered to herself. “I told you to stay away.”

Fabian fanned out with his men, cautiously approaching the flaming barrier. They stopped a wary distance away, forced to a halt by the heat before they could get anywhere close. His eyes were wide with disbelief as he took in the scene of carnage and the dimly glowing form of Kirkwall’s Knight-Captain. Varric’s eyes were wide with a different emotion. Fear. Or something so similar it was hard to tell the difference.

The Knight-Captain turned back to her. He lowered his blade ever so slightly. Its baleful glow still throbbed with the steady pulse of a beating heart, but she was grateful it was no longer levelled at her.

“You infiltrated my ranks.” He gave her a sharp nod that was somewhere between approving and resigned. “A wise decision,” he continued in a weary buzz, “even if it is more evidence of the Chantry’s deception.”

Cassandra gestured for Fabian to hold, even if they could have found a way to pass through the flames. She cautiously lowered her sword. Perhaps he was willing to talk.

“That was my only deception. The Conductor is a far greater threat to us all. We must deal with him, and then you can have your retribution.” She hesitated and inclined her head in the direction of Ser Corin’s body. “You are free of Knight-Commander Meredith’s hold over you now.”

She paused expectantly, but he didn’t seem to be paying any attention to her. The bloody glow of lyrium beneath his skin faded as he ran trembling talons through bedraggled hair. His focus had entirely shifted to the corpses around them, eyes widening. “Maker have mercy,” he breathed, greatsword drooping to the floor. “This again? Freedom is a lie.”

“Please, Knight-Captain,” Cassandra insisted. “I am not your enemy. We must work together.”

He shook his head sharply, focus snapping back to her. “No! I remember this trick, demon,” he accused her in a low rasp. "I shall embrace the Light. I shall weather the storm. I shall endure!”

The sword snapped up and he launched himself towards her again. The glow of lyrium flared up again, brighter than before, almost blinding. The cavern was reduced to a monochromatic world in shades of red.

She heard Fabian shout a warning as she took a neat step out of the Knight-Captain’s path at the very last moment. He shifted gracefully to meet her again, sword humming through the air towards her. A shock ran through her arms as she caught his blade on hers. The eyes that met hers over the crossed weapons were wide and staring.

He hauled his blade back. It flickered out again, too fast for her to stop. She felt a sharp flare of pain, struggled to ignore it amongst the other injuries mounting up on top of one another.

Something had changed. The strikes were still far too fast and far too strong, but they were lacking the precision he had shown before. She dug a little deeper into herself, hunting for her last dregs of strength. She crowded in close, refusing to allow him to use his greater reach to his advantage. She could do nothing to match his lyrium-fuelled strength, but she could negate that advantage at least.

She nearly shouted in delight as she managed a counter attack that slipped through his defence. Then another. Her elation faded when it seemed to make no difference to his assault. In despair, she barged forwards, attempting to knock him off balance. He dodged fluidly out of her way, long blade whipping out to the side. She ignored another flare of pain.

In an ideal scenario, her move would have knocked him back far enough to force him over the edge of the abyss beyond them. As it was, he hadn’t even lost his footing, but the surprise was enough to give her time to take a breath. More importantly, it had cleared her from Varric’s line of fire.

A flurry of crossbow bolts flew through the shadowed air of the cavern. A few were uselessly diverted by the sharp planes of his armour. Another whipped through the swirling skirts of his robes as he dodged to the side. A final, lucky shot lodged in his shoulder, just below the pauldron of his sword arm. When he shot towards her again, his movements were restricted enough that they were very nearly evenly matched.

Her heart hammered in her chest. Every breath was sandpaper against her throat. It was pure luck that allowed her to slip a strike in.

She didn’t expect that the blow would have an effect. The few others she had managed had certainly been ignored, whilst her own injuries and pulled muscles were a screaming chorus almost as loud as the buzz of lyrium and clash of blades.

A smooth strike to one of the weak spots unique to Free Marches templar armour. Perfectly placed. The kind that could be practised a thousand times and succeed only once.

When she withdrew her sword, it was stained with a sheen of lyrium-tainted blood. The Knight-Captain reacted minutely. Footwork that had been fluidly precise faltered ever so slightly. Not enough for an amateur to notice, but to Cassandra’s veteran eyes, the only thing more glaringly obvious would have been if he had dropped his sword altogether. She slid another counter attack in the minuscule pause he had left.

The delay was blatantly apparent this time. His sword arm drooped, the blow he had been aiming at her head falling well short. The greatsword gave an atonal ringing clatter as it hit the floor. The hand he lowered from his side was caked in blood from fingertips to wrist, masking the unnatural needle talons. Cassandra started as amber eyes hazed over with only the faintest gleam of red looked at her. Wide-eyed bewilderment, almost childlike in its intensity, was painted across his ashen features.

“The Maker’s will,” he whispered disbelievingly.

 _Is written in blood_ , she finished quietly.

A flick of her wrist and he lost his weakened hold on his weapon. It was sent flying from his hand to come to rest in a greasy pile of rags that had once been a despair demon.

He flinched more at being disarmed than he had at any of the few injuries Cassandra had inflicted. One cradled the oozing wound Cassandra had inflicted, the other reached out for the distant weapon as he fell to one knee.

He raised his head again as Cassandra drew her blade back him one final time. All the anger had gone. His expression was one of composed acceptance. He mouthed a single word in the split second before the blade struck.

The body slumped bonelessly to the floor, scarlet glow fading out entirely. The angry background buzz of lyrium petered out to nothing more than the faintest hum. It was quiet. Dull. The air was lifeless after the glaring light and clamour of battle.

Cassandra shuddered as she lowered her sword to dangle limply from one hand. She took one step away from the corpse, whispering a fragment of the prayer for the departed. Then another.

She truly wished she could say the Knight-Captain looked at peace now, resting by the Maker’s side. But without the feverish blush of lyrium, the body just looked sickly. The stark lighting underscored drawn features worn and lined beyond their years.

She had done her utmost to prevent unnecessary bloodshed. Killing him had been the only option left to her. She had been given no choice. Even so.

“Maker have mercy. This should not have happened,” she murmured. “You were not beyond redemption, Knight-Captain. But what was I to do?”

“Seeker Pentaghast! Maker be praised, you survived!” Fabian called out to her. "What in Andraste's name happened here?"

Cassandra reluctantly turned about to face them. The crimson flames were fading, already half the height they had been. Fabian and his men looked genuinely astounded, weapons held slackly by their sides.

“Is he really dead?” Varric called out warily.

“Merciful Maker,” she breathed. “I certainly hope so.”

Her reply was more a prayer to the Maker than a response to Varric’s question. Even when they were alive, these templars had looked more like corpses than living, breathing people. She found herself reluctant to check for a pulse. She had no idea what she would do if any were still alive. They were templars — the Maker’s servants — just like her. Self-defence was one matter, execution quite another. Kirkwall had suffered far too many deaths for her to want to add to them.

Fabian darted through a gap in the dying flames and jogged up to her. He batted at a few weak embers as he drew to a halt. “We can’t wait around here, Seeker."

She forced herself to focus. If she intended to stop any more deaths in Kirkwall, there was no time for regrets.

She narrowed her eyes at Fabian. “Where were you, Captain?” she snapped. “Much later and I would have been dead.”

He ducked his head in embarrassment. “We infiltrated Knight-Lieutenant Rost’s force, as you suggested. Not wandering around with crystals growing out of our heads almost gave us away. They suspected something was off, but we slipped away once—” His eyes widened slightly as his gaze flickered downwards. “Maker, Seeker.” He fumbled for something in his pocket. “You’re injured.”

Cassandra glanced downwards and flinched. Now that her attention had been drawn to it, she didn’t know how she could have missed it. Thick blood oozed from her side. A deep cut had been drawn across her ribs, slashing across the barely healed injury inflicted by a lyrium spine. It had been only a few days ago. It felt like months had passed since her arrival in Kirkwall.

She slumped slightly, every injury screaming for attention. She gladly took the elfroot potion Fabian shoved into her hand. It was the vibrant red of the most potent infusions. Like blood. Like red lyrium. She closed her eyes and drained the entire flask. She relaxed as a rush of energy filled her, washing away the foggy haze clouding her mind and the stiffness in her limbs. It wouldn’t do much good if she couldn’t stop to rest and heal, but at least it dulled the aches and pains.

“Thank you.”

He nodded wordlessly and handed her a neatly folded bandage. At least he had come prepared for disaster. “So. What now,” he asked quietly, crouching beside her as she gingerly eased herself down sit on the floor.

Cassandra did her best to pack the open wound, gritting her teeth against the pain. In theory, their work in Kirkwall was done now. The rogue splinter’s command structure had been permanently dismantled. Reconstruction would have been someone else’s task. In reality, there were far more severe problems to handle. Even forgetting the regrettable circumstances of the Knight-Captain’s death to consider a purely tactical perspective, she had needed him and the men he commanded. Maker knew she couldn’t fight hordes of demons alone. Now she had lost her army. There would still be templars somewhere here, assuming they hadn’t been ambushed too, but they wouldn’t listen to her orders without the Knight-Captain, assuming the Conductor didn’t simply steal their minds.

She shook her head slowly. None of that changed what needed to be done.

“Now? There is some blood mage darkspawn _thing_ down there." She waved a hand to take in the corpses. "He did this. Or at least his minions did. We must stop him before he can wield the strength this slaughter has given him.”

Fabian’s eyebrows rose. He leaned back on his heels and stroked his chin. “Down there? We’d never survive the journey.” He nodded at his hardened and ichor-stained auxiliaries waiting a polite distance away. Not a match for templars trained from childhood, but in that templar armour, it was nice to imagine that they were an elite squad from the Order. A faithful chapter, that was, rather than Kirkwall’s corrupted templars. “Not if I had five times the men.”

Cassandra was grateful he made no mention of just how battered she knew she had to look. She had been through worse, and with the help of the elfroot, at least she felt able to continue. She winced as a painful rib made itself known after an incautious movement. Maker willing, he had a few more on him.

“She’s right,” Merrill said, stepping delicately over fallen corpses to join them. The copper smell of blood magic surrounded her like a shroud. “One wrong move and the Veil will tear right open. You can’t leave now.”

Fabian shook his head. “It’s impossible,” he told her, flatly serious as he looked between her and Merrill. “Believe me when I say those passages are crawling with demons and the dead. Too much even for a Seeker of Truth. I don’t know what happened. One moment we were in an empty tunnel, the next…” he shuddered. “Maker. Demons everywhere. I’ve never seen so many in one place.”

“We can hardly do nothing.” She eased herself back onto her feet and gestured to take in the slaughter around them, the trails of blood leaking over the edge into the abyss. Blood? A dangerous thinning of the Veil? This much lyrium? Conductor? Too many coincidences for comfort. She shuddered, wishing she had never been required to read the dissonant verses of the Chant. “If they are trying to do what I suspect, we must stop it.”

“As you order, Seeker Pentaghast,” Fabian sighed. “But how, exactly?”

Varric joined them, hunching into himself as he drew closer. His focus slid past her to the fallen greatsword. Even with the Knight-Captain dead, it still pulsed with light in a sluggish breathing rhythm. “Maybe that will help.” He took a half step closer to it, hands twitching by his side. “You saw what it can do.”

Fabian followed Varric’s gaze and cocked his head, eyes narrowed. “The dwarf has a point, Seeker. I’m a decent hand with greatswords. I’d be happy to give it a try.”

Varric glared at Fabian. “Not on your life, Ansburg.”

Cassandra flicked a look between the pair of them. “Maker give me strength. You cannot be serious.”

She marched up to the greatsword and grabbed it by the hilt. She shuddered as her hand came into contact with the weapon. It was lighter than such an unwieldy weapon should have been. Unpleasantly warm to the touch, even through the leather of her gloves. A gentle crawling of the skin in her palm grew to an itch, then a prickling pain that spread to the reopened wound in her side. She turned on a heel and marched to the edge of the pit. The weapon flipped end over end as she tossed into the abyss. Varric gave an abortive shout and rushed to the edge in time to see the pale splinter vanish into the impenetrable gloom.

“What did you do that for?!” he growled, peering over the edge. “I could have used it to stop whatever’s happening down here.”

“Nothing good can come of corruption,” she snapped. “You of all people should know what that thing can do.”

Varric blinked and shook himself. “Right. Right.” His scowl faded into a sheepish grin, a pale reflection of his toothy smiles. He cleared his throat. “There’s more than enough craziness to go around without that thing too. Good riddance.”

Cassandra kneaded her forehead. “What are you doing here anyway, Varric? I told you to stay safe in Lowtown.” Varric tore his focus away from the pit to give Cassandra a wry grin. She rolled her eyes and shifted the glare to Merrill. “And you, blood mage. What were you thinking? You could have been killed with this many templars around.”

“But I wasn’t,” Merrill replied, arms folded tightly over her chest. “You need us, Seeker Pentaghast.”

Varric nodded sharply. “Kirkwall is my city. I’m not leaving someone else to fight my battles for me. You’re just lucky we bumped into your people along the way.” He hesitated, gaze passing over the heaps of fallen templars to land on the Knight-Captain. “He didn’t defend himself at the end.”

“So it would seem,” she replied flatly.

“What did he say?” Merrill asked.

“He requested mercy.”

Varric barked out a harsh laugh. “I’m glad he didn’t get it, after what he and Meredith have done to Kirkwall.”

Cassandra cast a long glance over her shoulder at the slumped body. He might have been a good man in a different life. There had been glimpses of an ally she would have been glad to work with rather than against. If the Seekers had responded earlier, perhaps this whole tragedy might have been averted. But the path the Maker dictated could be cruel.

“In the end, he was still a templar, raised and dedicated in the Maker’s service,” she replied bleakly. “I gave him Mercy.”

Fabian had been in close enough proximity to the Chantry and the Order to recognise the emphasis where Varric didn’t. She exchanged a grim nod with him over Varric’s head.

She emptied her lungs in a long sigh. A part of her wished she had never even heard of Kirkwall. This whole assignment had been a series of catastrophes right from the start, but she had a job to finish.

“We have no choice but to return to the Darktown passages. Unless there is another suggestion.”

“Ropes?” Fabian supplied. “We could climb down the pit.”

Varric eyed Fabian with amusement. “I’m sure you can hide a lot under those templar skirts, but there’s not enough rope in all of Kirkwall to get down there.”

Cassandra stepped up to the edge of the pit, bracing herself against the arid wind that buffeted her. Perhaps it was simply her imagination, but the gusts seemed stronger now. The sides were almost glassily smooth. Climbing down was definitely not an option, and none of them had rope.

“Magic.”

Cassandra and Fabian snapped looks at Merrill in unison. “Magic,” Cassandra repeated flatly. “We do not need a blood mage creating more trouble for us. Regardless, it is too far. No mage has the kind of strength necessary to slow our fall from that kind of height.”

Merrill cocked her head, smiling faintly. The rivulets of blood oozing through the carved channels in the floor had reduced to a thin trickle now, but what was left slowed to a halt and began to reverse. A slick of sticky liquid gathered in a spreading pool around her feet.

“Normally you would be right, but there’s a lot of power in this blood, Seeker Pentaghast.”

Cassandra suppressed the urge to flinch away from the gathering pool. Fabian did a worse job of it, spitting out a coarse oath as he stumbled back a pace. The cluster of auxiliaries waited far less politely now, hands on the hilts of their swords as they waited for an order.

“This is the fastest option you’re going to find,” Merrill continued sternly. “I want to stop this as much as you do.”

“Maker forgive me,” Cassandra sighed. No time to consider anything else. A calculated risk. “Do it.”

Fabian dropped his hand away from his sword and stared at Cassandra wide-eyed. “Seeker Pentaghast! You can’t be serious.”

“It would seem to be the lesser evil.” She turned to Merrill, lip curling in disgust. “How many can be safely carried?”

“I can take you, Varric, and your seeker friend.”

“It will have to be enough.” She stepped back up to the edge of the abyss and shivered. It yawned wide and hungry. The sepulchral darkness made it impossible to judge whether the outcroppings of lyrium were monstrous growths hundreds of feet below her or tiny spines within arm’s reach. The view made certain death in the tunnels seemed tempting. “We should go, before my sanity returns.”

“Good,” Merrill replied brightly. The copper stench of blood magic thickened. Fat ribbons of glistening blood twined their way up her legs and curled lovingly about her arms. “Jump.”

“Jump? You can’t be serious, Daisy.”

“I’d really rather not,” Fabian muttered. “Are you sure about this, Seeker Pentaghast?”

“Not especially. I would welcome any other suggestion.” She shook her head resignedly when Fabian stared mutely at her. “Madness it is. The rest of you, make your way to safety above ground. Take no risks,” she called out over her shoulder to the remaining auxiliaries. So much for her backup plan.

“Merciful Andraste,” Fabian muttered. “If I live through this, I’ll join the Chantry proper. Swear vow and become a Brother. Live in a monastery the rest of my life. Whatever you want.”

“If we live through this, _I_ _’ll_ join the Chantry,” Varric retorted. He rolled his shoulders and winced. “I knew you were mad as soon as I met you, Seeker. Let’s do this.”

At Merrill’s nod, Cassandra hauled in a fortifying breath, closed her eyes, and leapt.

The feeble light of the torches in the cavern faded out far too quickly. Tiny embers, then distant pinpricks. It was dark enough that the only hint of movement was in the dry air rushing past her like sandpaper against her skin, stealing the air from her lungs.

Then there was nothing but red, reaching out, grasping for her. She was going to be impaled. She reached forwards as if she could somehow fend off the rapidly approaching crystal outcroppings. They weren’t at all small. They were huge growths taller than a man. A yell built on her lips.

Something grabbed her and tugged her to the side. All her breath left in a rush, stifling the yell before it could break free.

She caught a glimpse of Varric and Fabian off to either side as black shadows against vivid crystal. They were all connected to Merrill by tendrils of something that glistened faintly in the darkness. Cassandra didn’t want to contemplate what they were. Varric paddled at the air, coat whipping out around him. Fabian fell with limbs outstretched. Cassandra followed suit. Anything to help slow their fall.

They were in a tight cluster now. Someone was reciting the Chant in an unbroken stream, words stolen away like breath in the screaming wind of the fall. It had to be her. No one else could possibly know such an obscure tract.

There was another tug that whipped them up. A stream of colourful curses carried to her. It could have been Varric or Fabian. All around them, some unnatural fusion of magic shimmered into life. Blood magic, of course, but combined with something almost like the spells of a force mage.

Merrill shouted something, but the words were stolen away by the wind. Cassandra followed her gesture to look down. Her heart skipped a beat as she saw ground rushing up towards them. Their fall was slowed to a running pace and then to a fast walk.

They tumbled onto level ground in a tangle of limbs and muffled shouts. Cassandra did her best to roll with the fall, every pulled muscle and cracked rib making itself known. She came to a halt against something that gave slightly beneath her hands. She scrambled away with a grunt of disgust and levered herself to her feet.

Corpses. The bottom of the pit was littered with bodies lying scattered amongst spines of red lyrium that clawed up into air thick with the stench of blood magic. They were strewn across the ground in some vast pattern, each one at the heart of a tangled rune that was unashamedly beautiful in its complexity. The Veil was painfully, treacherously thin here. Even the simplest movement threatened to tear it open.

“Not a word,” Cassandra ordered in a harsh whisper, gesturing for the others to drop into a low crouch. “Do not cast anything, Merrill.”

There was nothing living anywhere near them, but there was a pressure that had her sure something was right behind her, all gaping mouth and claws. Demons pressed up against the boundary between the Fade and the physical world. There was a haze in the air. It clashed uncomfortably with the lurid crimson of lyrium. If the Veil was thin enough that the unnatural light of the Fade was leaking through… It didn’t bear contemplating.

Cassandra eased herself forwards to see around the closest lyrium spire. The ground sloped down ever so slightly. Not enough to be seen with the naked eye, but there were channels carved into the floor here, much as they had been in the cavern far above. Runnels of blood flowed steadily onwards, spokes in a wheel leading to the very epicentre of the vast space at the bottom of the chantry pit.

She hurriedly gestured the others lower. The pit wasn’t as empty as it had seemed. Even from this distance, the twisted form of the Conductor was distinctive. So were the lyrium-corrupted forms of Kirkwall’s templars. Some had been tossed to one side in a crumpled heap. Others kneeled around him, placidly waiting for their moment under the wicked knife that the Conductor wielded with brutal economy.

The altar in front of which he stood was plain, although obviously of Tevinter origin. It was utterly chilling in its simplicity. This was a construct intended for one purpose only. The slaughter of hundreds. Maker. Thousands. There was barely a patch of ground that wasn’t clotted with blood.

She eased backwards and slumped into a seated position. What exactly could the four of them do against that much power?

“Well?” Fabian whispered. He looked too much like one of the corrupt templars in that armour, drawn expression rendered oddly flat by the uniform glow. “Seeker. Tell me you have a plan for this.”

A plan? No one could plan for something like this. There was a Darkspawn thing there with the blood of thousands of deaths at his fingertips. Maker knew how much more that would be amplified by the sea of runes and the lyrium humming and crackling around them. She exhaled and scrubbed a hand over her face.

“Merrill, are you sure you do not recognise these runes?”

“No. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Maker.”

One hand unconsciously curled around the worn hilt of her sword as she evaluated the few options they had. Facing the Conductor head on would be suicide. That could be ruled out immediately. Blood magic runes were difficult to unpick at the best of times. When they were this well established, the best she would be able to do was weaken them. With an army of templars, it would have been feasible. Alone, it was impossible. Those were the only options they had.

Her shoulder slumped as she looked around at the anxious faces crouched around her. The Seekers of Truth were called on to handle the most difficult problems. They expected a plan from her.

“C’mon, Seeker. You’ve had a plan for everything until now,” Varric said quietly. “Crazy ones, but plans.”

Her eyes widened. Perhaps there was another option. A slim chance, but not entirely futile.

“Glyphs. Hexes. How well do you know them,Merrill?”

Merrill blinked at Cassandra a moment. “I know a little. It’s not a very Dalish art.”

“Well enough to know a misdirection hex? Perhaps neutralisation?” she added hopefully. Considering that she had already admitted to having no skill in healing, a neutralisation glyph, offshoot of the same school, would be too much to ask.

“I could manage misdirection,” Merrill replied cautiously. “It’s just…” she traced the shape in the air, a look of concentration on her face, before turning a puzzled frown on the rest of them. Cassandra hoped it wasn’t because her idea was impossible.

“Wait,” Fabian blurted out. “I know I’m not a Seeker, but surely casting any spell down here would be a bad idea, let alone blood magic.”

“You would be right, but this is not blood magic,” Cassandra replied with a firm shake of her head. “If an active spell is altered—”

“Oh!” Merrill interjected, expression lighting up as she caught Cassandra’s intention. “We could break the pattern.”

“Precisely. Combined with a weakening of other runes, perhaps we might be able to confuse the casting.” Cassandra breathed a subdued sigh of relief. Not intended purpose of a misdirection hex, but clearly not impossible. Neutralisation might have been more effective, but misdirection would serve. Provided they could corrupt enough of the runes before the spell casting was completed.

Varric drew his crossbow from his back and settled it in his lap. “So. That’s Daisy sorted.” He stuck a thumb over his shoulder to take in himself and Fabian. “What about those of us who prefer our blood inside our skin?”

“I doubt we will be able to stay concealed for long once we begin interfering with the spell. Varric, protect Merrill,” she pointed off to their left. “Work your way around as far as you can. Captain, you and I will work in the opposite direction.”

Fabian stared at Cassandra, jaw working as he shifted uneasily on his heels. “Andraste’s flaming sword. This is madness.”

“Focus, Captain. It is the only plan that has any chance of success.”

“I suppose I should have expected a job in the auxiliaries to end in death by blood mage,” he muttered gloomily. “Lead the way, Seeker.”

Varric and Merrill rose to their feet. There was nothing more that it could be said. Now they could only pray that their effort would be more than meaningless fumbling.

Cassandra set off in a low crouch, winding her way around the lyrium outcroppings, cautiously stepping over blood-filled channels in the floor and around labyrinthine runes. Fabian followed as closely in her footsteps as he could. She heard a sharp intake of breath from him as the skirts of his stolen templar robes brushed against the edge of a rune. If only it were so easy to break them.

When she judged there was enough separation from Varric and Merrill, she planted herself in front of a particularly delicately painted rune. She closed her eyes and focused inwards. It was difficult to concentrate knowing what was all around her. Even with her eyes closed, she could hear the atonal hum and subdued snapping retorts of red lyrium. The stench of blood magic was an almost physical presence in dry air that seemed to be sapping every drop of moisture from her.

A distant metallic crunch broke her focus. She forced her eyes shut again and inhaled deeply.

There was a dull thud followed by the smell of charred blood. When she opened her eyes, the delicate rune had lost some of its definition. A few lines were blurred and the glistening sheen had faded. It would have to be enough. She gestured Fabian onwards. Maker knew how many would have to be damaged before it would have any noticeable effect.

They crept to another rune. Focus was easier to find this time. A dull thud, the smell of charred blood, and they moved onwards. The third was more stubborn, barely fading after she had cleansed it. She shook her head and gestured Fabian on to another. She couldn’t waste her time focusing on a single rune when there countless others.

The fourth she chose was obviously newer. It shattered in a cascading wave of coppery sparks. She winced and muttered a prayer. The way the sound had carried, stealth wasn’t going to be an option for much longer.

She and Fabian froze as the rasping voice of the Conductor echoed from the crystal spires in a rolling boom.

“Who dares interfere? Find them and bring them to me.”

Fabian drew his sword and ushered Cassandra onwards. “We’d better move, Seeker. I’ll keep them off you.”

“Be careful,” she whispered back.

He saluted with his sword and gave her a taut smile. “I can take a few templars and blood mages. It’s what you pay me for.”

Cassandra nodded. "Maker be with you.”

He rushed off in the direction they had come from, quickly disappearing from view. Cassandra murmured a quick prayer and darted to the next rune. Another failed cleanse, intricate shape barely marred. She shook her head and chose another.

There was a hissing rattle from somewhere behind her, then the the clash of steel against steel. Templars fighting side by side with demons. As if this whole scenario needed to be any more nightmarish. Fabian was a competent swordsman. She only had to pray he wouldn’t be overwhelmed.

Focus was becoming harder to maintain now as her body and mind begged for rest. She shattered two runes in quick succession. As satisfying as it was to break them entirely, it would only draw attention to her. She broke into a jog as she headed to the next. Her arc had taken her around perhaps an eighth of the pit and broken a pitiful fraction of the runes that covered every bare space on the ground. Maker knew if it was enough.

The next three runes were stubborn. For all the wavering concentration she brought to bear to cleanse them, they remained as crisp as ones freshly cast.

With her attention fixed on the ground, it was almost too late when she spotted the templar rushing towards her from between the forest of lyrium spires. He was so burdened with crystal that she could easily have been lost to view if she had stood still.

Cassandra released her focus and whipped her sword from its sheath. Chipped metal screeched off crystal-encrusted armour and slid home. The templar’s vacant eyes cleared as he stared bemusedly at the length of steel in his chest. He coughed blood and staggered backwards, sliding off her sword.

“Kill the blood mage,” he choked out. “Please.”

The crystalline sound of armoured footsteps carried towards, blurred into a confusion of echoes. She chose a direction at random and cleansed another rune. Then was forced to a halt by another one that stubbornly held its grip on reality.

When she turned to the next, a templar with empty red eyes blocked her path. The sound of armoured feet echoed in from every direction. She could hear the rattling laughter of possessed corpses behind her, the croaking hiss of a demon to one side. She turned in a circle, blade slanted protectively across her body. Every avenue of retreat was blocked. If only she hadn’t lost her shield.

“You are more resilient than expected, Seeker of Truth.”

Cassandra snapped about to the source of the words. Empty-eyed templars stepped fluidly to one side, blankly indifferent to the misshapen figure of the Conductor as he strode past them. She slumped resignedly. It seemed that this was the end of her journey.

He cast a brief glance at the blurred rune behind Cassandra and raised an arm stained with blood to the elbow. With a languid wave of a bony hand, the lines sharpened, sending a renewed wave of rot and putrefaction through the air.

“I have fought worse than you, blood mage,” she retorted. It was a petty, meaningless response now, but she drew together what tattered remains of her focus she could find and cleansed the refreshed rune. A demon screeched angrily as the fringes of the cleanse washed over it. Anything to keep attention focused on her rather than Merrill and Varric. Maker willing they hadn’t been caught.

A templar glided towards her in a blur. She was sent flying by an armoured fist to the gut. When her vision cleared, the razor-sharp point of a lyrium spine that might once have been an arm was levelled at her throat.

“Wait,” the Conductor ordered. She was hauled to her feet and forced to face him. He bent down until a misshapen face with glaring red eyes was level with hers. Skin twisted around the broken shards of lyrium fused with his skin as he sneered contemptuously. The lyrium should have had him writhing in agony. Foul breath washed over her as he continued. “Your defiance is misguided. You fail to see what is at stake here.”

“Then tell me. What _is_ at stake, creature?”

He straightened and clenched a fist. “Eternity. I have seen the empty seat of the Maker. Your god cannot hear your prayers. My efforts will see that situation remedied.”

“This is madness. You speak of heresy,” Cassandra breathed. A shudder of disgust rippled through tired muscles. She knew better to fight against the hold on her arms, but she wanted nothing more than to shove a length of honed steel through the creature’s gut. “You cannot do this. Corruption blackened the Golden City and could do so again.”

His laugh was a cruel, sharp sound. “Your naivety grows tiresome. You will see the truth you claim to seek. The Golden City will be healed by my hand and you will be the first to kneel before your new god.” He gestured to his patient thralls. “Come.”

She was dragged down the gently sloping route to the altar at the very centre of the pit. She glanced briefly upwards. There was a tiny pinprick of clear sky far, far above her. She could have covered it with a thumb if her arms had been free.

This creature could not be allowed to succeed, but there was nothing more she could do now. The very idea of something so foul furthering the corruption that had blackened the Golden City was appalling. A violent wave of nausea washed over her and coiled in her gut, a pool as foul as the rank stench of blood magic that permeated the air. She stumbled and fell, wrenching her shoulder in the grip of a templar. The already tender joint screamed in pain.

“Merciful Maker. Graceful Andraste,” she prayed quietly, eyes squeezed shut as she was hauled back up to her feet. “If there was ever a time to make your presence known, it would be now.”

She glanced to the templars in a ring around her. Their march was clumsy and awkward, minds lost to the Conductor’s control. Any vain hope that of recruiting their assistance disappeared at the sight of those frozen crystalline faces. They were tools. The Knight-Captain had said that those furthest lost to red lyrium were little better than golems. Golems always had a key, a control rod to command their loyalty, and this creature calling himself the Conductor held that control rod. Without the raw strength of the red lyrium blade and templar training to draw on its power, there was nothing she could do to shake the hold over their minds.

She was forced to her knees in the sticky pool surrounding the altar. It was warm, the smooth surface reflecting the red lyrium spires ringing the centre. They had been grown this way. No erratic and haphazard outcroppings like in the Gallows. Everything had been planned with the sole intention of breaking through to the Black City itself. Maker knew how long this had been planned.

Cassandra blinked slowly at her hzy reflection in the faintly glowing liquid. She could hardly blame the Band of Three for burning the lore they had found. Nobody — nothing — should have this knowledge. And now she was relying on a blood mage of all things to put a stop to this catastrophe. This sacrilege.

She could only pray it hadn’t been a mistake.

She raised her head listlessly as an abomination stalked into the ring. She shuddered and her shoulders drooped lower at the sight of the battered corpse it dragged in one flame-bright hand. It tossed Fabian’s limp body onto a pile of corpses with casual and indifferent strength. He had fought to the the last. His only reward for her trust in her was death in a Maker-forsaken pit. For all that the auxiliaries were there to support the Seekers of Truth to their last breath if need be, every death was another weight to bear. At least it seemed unlikely she would live long enough to bear this one.

The abomination circled Cassandra a few times, trailing the smell of burning hair. Fat globules of flame dripped from its fingers to sizzle in the pool of blood. “I should kill you, Seeker. You’re as bad as the templars,” it hissed. It cocked its deformed head in sharp, animal movement. “Worse, perhaps. I would like to watch you burn.”

“Your master wants me alive, abomination,” she replied wearily.

It laughed, a sound like steam escaping a kettle. “For now.”

“For now,” Cassandra agreed quietly.

If her plan succeeded, the spell would fail. It might backfire. This much raw magical power would likely finish the job the chantry explosion had started and level the entirety of Hightown. Perhaps most of Lowtown too. A high price to pay, but a necessary one. No one in the pit would live long enough to see the result.

Of course, if her plan failed, Maker knew what would happen. Her death would probably follow soon after. Hopefully it would be quick.

A handful of templars trickled into the circle ahead of the conductor. He strode towards Cassandra, an angry grimace on his face. “Someone still interferes with my plans. Who?” he demanded.

She shrugged and offered him a mocking smile. Merrill and Varric hadn’t been captured yet. There was still hope. “Find out.”

She braced herself as he raised an arm to backhand her. He lowered it with a contemptuous shake of his head. “No matter. The spell will be completed regardless.”

He grabbed a motionless templar and slit his throat unceremoniously. A wash of blood sheeted over his armour and he collapsed to join the other corpses littering the ground.

There was a scuffling and the sound of raised voices from beyond. Cassandra closed her eyes and exhaled. Varric.

When she opened her eyes again, he and Merrill had been forced to kneel in front of the Conductor.

“A child of the Deep Roads and a slave,” he sneered. “Strange allies, Seeker of Truth.” He grabbed Merrill and hauled her up to his eye level. She struggled in his grip, batting helplessly at his arm. “You toy with forces you have not the wit to understand, slave.”

He tossed her to one side. She hit a lyrium crystal with a painful crunch. That she made no other sound sent a chill through Cassandra’s blood. Merrill was a mage and she most certainly wouldn’t have had the Conductor’s baffling immunity to contact with lyrium.

“Merciful Maker! No,” she whispered.

Varric struggled to jump to his feet. “Daisy!” He turned on the Conductor. “I’ll kill you,” he snarled.

The Conductor turned his back on Varric, utterly indifferent to the dwarf struggling to break free of the gauntleted hands keeping him down. He stalked up to the altar. A row of templars knelt down and bared their throats. With a flourish, the wicked blade leapt out. Blood sheeted to the floor.

The lyrium ringing them crackled angrily, spitting out fat arcs of lightning that licked up into the air. Crackling streamers of energy erupted from the tops and in between each spine, surrounding them in an inferno of bloody fire. The air smelt of copper and ozone. Rot and char. Blood magic and lyrium. A combination that was the stuff of nightmares for any of the Maker’s warrior servants.

Another row of templars knelt and fell beneath the Conductor’s blade.

Those creatures of the Fade gathered around the altar shifted in eager anticipation. Even a child could have sensed the demons teeming on the other side of the Veil. The Conductor began to recite something. The sound was familiar even if the words weren’t. Ancient Tevene, language of the magisters who had first corrupted the Golden City.

Cassandra closed her eyes and began to whisper the Chant. She focused inwards, shutting out the sounds of Varric’s shouts, the impatient demons, the falling bodies, the building hostile crackle of red lyrium. The feel of her aches and pains and the sticky warmth of blood soaking through her leathers. Finally, she shut out her awareness of the foul corruption that rubbed against her senses, demanding her attention.

“The Light shall lead her safely through the paths of this world, and into the next.” One hand drifted to her empty scabbard, the other rested flat on the ground as she bowed her head and recited the words with quiet sincerity. “And she will know no fear of death, for the Maker shall be her beacon and her shield. Her foundation and her sword.”

Cassandra’s ears popped. Brilliant light seared through the paltry protection of her closed eyes. A howling, screeching maelstrom erupted, seemingly right beneath her feet and cold as the void itself. She was sucked up into the air, twisting and flailing desperately for solid ground. The bass roar of a pride demon, shattering crystal, howling wind and crackling thunder, all rolled into one solid wall of noise. Her skin burnt as if she was swimming in raw magical energy.

Another blast sent her shooting outwards. She slammed into something and tried to grab onto it. The slick surface slid from her fingers.

She let go as burning heat soaked through her gloves. She slammed into something else. Felt an armoured body hit hers and go careening away. She impacted into another solid surface, this one flat and unyielding. She couldn’t hear anything beyond the furious roar of the maelstrom that kept her pinned to the wall. She squeezed her eyes shut, tears of pain leaking from beneath her eyelids. She couldn’t breathe. Ice-cold wind was stealing the air from her lungs.

Without any warning, the howling gale stopped. Cassandra dropped to the ground, landing with a painful thud on bruised hands and knees.

She spent a moment just remembering how to breathe, shaky breaths echoing oddly in ears that felt as if they had been stuffed with wool.

She didn’t dare open her eyes, fearful that she might see the Fade — or worse, the gates of the Black City — when she opened them.

She gently brushed a hand against the ground beneath her. It felt rugged, rocky. Natural. The burning tingle of raw magic dissipating across her skin had faded, and the air still held the faint ozone smell of lyrium and the taint of old blood magic. Perhaps this wasn’t the Fade.

She tentatively cracked an eyelid, then opened her eyes fully to take in the sight. She was still in the chantry pit, albeit vastly changed. Sickly green light lit made the space look far more shadowy that it had done. More than half the forest of lyrium spines had to have shattered. Those few still left whole stood like lonely broken teeth in a vast cleared space that drew her eyes right to the altar at the centre.

The Conductor was nowhere to be seen, and the altar was gone. Or at least gone from view. In its place was a wavering, nebulous beam of seething energy tinted the unnatural hue of the raw Fade. Her heart skipped a beat as she tracked the beam upwards to the distant speck of sky.

She unconsciously whispered a prayer. The maelstrom hadn’t stopped, it had simply retreated up into open air. A whirlwind of vivid green cloud swirled directly above her. Malevolent and chillingly, utterly unnatural, it obscured any faint view of the sky. As she watched, the eye of the storm spat out a fiery ball of energy, and then another.

Was this what a failed spell to send someone into the Fade looked like? She couldn’t imagine this was the result of a successful casting. Too much energy had been wasted, directed outwards instead of harnessed to the Conductor’s will. Magic designed to send someone physically through the Veil could well have simply torn it when it failed.

She wasn’t sure whether that was worse. It was near impossible to seal a tiny tear, let alone an immense breach like this.

“Daisy! Seeker!” a distant voice called out desperately. “You alive?”

Cassandra shot to her feet, stumbling on knees that were weak with relief, and scanned the dim green-edged shadows. “Varric! Here!”

“Seeker,” he shouted back. “You’re alive?!”

There was a rattle of falling stones. Varric’s familiar squat figure clambered over a shattered lump of rock. His vibrant coat was grey with dust and a cut on his check bled profusely. He didn’t seem to notice as he limped up to her, one arm cradled protectively in front of his chest.

“Andraste’s ass,” Varric swore. He swiped a hand across his brow, spreading dust and blood, and leaned heavily on his crossbow for support. “If this is success, I don’t want to see failure.”

“I’m not sure it could be called success,” she replied grimly. “Did you see the Conductor?”

“I saw a lot of dead templars. No sign of that thing.” He grimaced. “I hope the blast killed him.”

“Maker. I hope so.”

“So. What now?” Varric asked wearily. He eased himself onto a chunk of stone and rested his crossbow on his knees.

Cassandra slumped down beside him and followed the flickering beam of green light up the rough walls of the pit and then further up to the distant circle of sky above. A mass of clouds in the lurid fade-touched green swirled above them, like the centre of a storm. Her eyes watered in pain. She could barely look at it. No living creature who was not a mage should ever see the raw Fade. The Maker had created the Veil to stand between them and the spirits that teemed beyond. What could a human and a dwarf do to match that?

“Andraste give me strength,” she murmured. “I do not know, Varric.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we have reached the end of a story clumsily held up with bits of patched-together lore and crazy ideas that finishes with the prospect of an Inquisition-type AU that I don’t actually intend to write.
> 
> I really hope this held together as something vaguely sensible. It fit in my head. Whether it worked for anyone else or not is another question. Either way, thank you to those who stuck it out until the end! Your comments, kudos, or attention were very much appreciated!


End file.
